The cameras were already out. They’re always out. In Karnal, a city that usually only makes headlines for highway dhabas or local politics, the digital panopticon found its latest victim in Mouni Roy. It’s the same old script, just a different coordinate on the map. A crowd swells, the security perimeter turns into a suggestion, and suddenly, a human being becomes a piece of public property because someone wants a high-res shot of a nightmare for their Reels feed.

This time, the commentary didn’t just come from the usual swamp of X threads. Sunny Leone stepped into the frame, telling the press she was "proud" of how Roy handled the harassment. It’s a rare moment of solidarity in an industry that usually treats peer-to-peer support like a trade secret. But look closer. It isn’t just about two actors standing together. It’s about the staggering, invisible tax women pay to exist in the physical world while being famous on the internet.

We’ve built an attention economy that views boundaries as friction. When Roy was mobbed and harassed in Karnal, the people holding the phones weren't looking for a conversation. They were looking for an asset. In the logic of the modern internet, a celebrity isn't a person; they’re a high-value node in a network. If you can touch the node, or better yet, make the node flinch on camera, your engagement metrics spike.

Leone’s support carries weight because she’s the patron saint of surviving the digital meat grinder. She knows the price tag better than anyone. She’s spent a decade navigating an Indian internet that is simultaneously obsessed with her and deeply hostile toward her. When she says she’s proud of Roy, she’s not talking about a red-carpet performance. She’s talking about the grim, exhausting work of maintaining dignity while a mob tries to turn you into a 15-second clip of "Celebrity Gets Angry."

The friction here is literal. It’s the physical touch of strangers who feel entitled to it because they’ve liked a thousand photos of the victim. We call it "fandom," which is a polite euphemism for a parasocial fever dream fueled by Instagram’s algorithm. The platform demands intimacy. It demands "behind-the-scenes" access. It rewards the creator who lets the audience in. But the audience doesn't know where the screen ends and the skin begins.

Security detail in these tier-2 cities is often a joke, a few guys in safari suits trying to hold back a tide of five hundred smartphones. The cost of "real" security—the kind that actually keeps a perimeter—can run into lakhs per day. Most production houses or event organizers won't pay it. They’d rather take the risk. If something goes wrong, it’s "unfortunate." If it goes viral, it’s "promotion." It’s a cynical trade-off where the talent’s safety is the first thing on the chopping block to keep the margins lean.

Roy’s "bravery," as Leone put it, is actually just a survival mechanism. What else was she supposed to do? The internet loves a "graceful" victim. If she had swung a handbag or screamed, the narrative would have shifted in seconds. The headlines would have pivoted to "Mouni Roy Loses Cool in Karnal." The tech stacks we live on have stripped away the right to a reflex. You have to be harassed, recorded, and then you have to be "proudly" resilient, all while the person who grabbed your arm is busy uploading the footage to a server in Virginia.

Leone’s intervention feels like a weary nod from one veteran to another. It’s a recognition that the "harassment incident" isn't a bug in the system; it’s a feature. We’ve incentivized the mob. Every time a platform pushes a "candid" video of a celebrity being swamped, it’s training the next crowd to be more aggressive, more intrusive, more tactile.

The platforms won't fix this. There’s no "anti-harassment" toggle for a physical crowd in Haryana. There’s just the mounting psychological bill and the hope that the next time the perimeter collapses, you’ve got enough "grace" left in the tank to satisfy the commenters.

If the price of admission to the digital town square is the loss of physical autonomy, how long before the talent just stops showing up in the real world altogether?