Lanna Hill: Dignified silence always has an uneven cost

For decades, women were told the dignified response to public embarrassment was silence — protect others’ comfort, swallow your own. Dignified silence was treated like a virtue. But often it wasn’t dignity at all. It was compliance with a social rule: if something messy happens to you, you should carry the mess privately so the rest of the room can stay calm.

This week, Jules Neale did the opposite. She didn’t let the “working through” narrative settle. She publicly rejected it and framed her experience as betrayal and healing, not a neat mutual storyline. It’s easy to dismiss that as gossip, and that’s the trap. The real shift isn’t the details of anyone’s marriage. It’s the refusal to play the old role: the woman who absorbs humiliation quietly so everyone else can keep their version of events intact.

The same shift showed up earlier this year in a very different register, when Deborra-Lee Furness made a statement as her divorce was formalised. It wasn’t a tell-all. It was controlled, but it still refused the sanitised script. She used words like betrayal and described it as a wound — language that doesn’t exist in the usual celebrity PR template of “we remain friends and ask for privacy”.

That’s what so often gets missed when it comes to speaking out — it doesn’t have to look chaotic. Sometimes it looks like one sentence that draws a boundary around reality: this happened, it mattered, and I’m not dressing it up to protect anyone else. And it’s not just happening in relationships. You can see the same cultural movement inside workplaces; not through confessionals, but through rules changing. For decades, pay secrecy was a perfect example of enforced silence dressed up as professionalism. Don’t talk about your salary, or name inequity. If you did, you were difficult, ungrateful, or creating issues.

Now, the law has moved. Workers have rights around sharing (or not sharing) pay and employment conditions and pay secrecy terms have been constrained in ways that make it harder for employers to gag the conversation entirely. That legal shift matters for the same reason Jules Neale’s statement matters: it changes what’s permissible, and removes the old social penalty for naming reality.

This is the part where people worry the pendulum has swung too far — that we’re becoming a culture of oversharing, and public and permanent grievance, which is fair. The internet isn’t a court, and a public narrative is not the same thing as a fair process.

But dignified silence didn’t protect people equally either. Silence has always had an uneven cost. Very rarely does it result in both parties feeling like their truth is the accepted version. That’s why this moment feels bigger than celebrity drama. It’s not “women are being messy”. It’s “women are refusing to do reputational housekeeping for other people”.

There’s a reason this shift is happening now. Women have watched how quickly a story gets written about them at work, in the media, in relationships, and how hard it is to claw it back once it hardens into common knowledge. Speaking up isn’t always attention-seeking. Often, it’s self-defence.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether Jules Neale should have said anything. It’s why we still expect silence to be the gold standard when silence has so often been a tool of convenience and power — for families, for employers, for institutions, for anyone who benefits from the room staying calm.

Dignity isn’t silence. Dignity is agency. And more women are choosing agency, even when it makes other people squirm.

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker, board director and founder of Leverage Media and Rally Group