Any connoisseur of screaming at people on the Internet will remember “the Dress”: a viral photograph of a Roman Originals frock that was either white and gold or blue and black depending on the viewer. If you do remember the Dress, you’ll be familiar with the havoc it wreaked upon the world. Those who saw a white-and-gold dress became violently opposed to anyone who saw a blue-and-black dress. The Dress ended friendships. It ripped families apart. Scientific journals dedicated entire special issues to the subject.
Now, 10 years later, another online disagreement has turned similarly nuclear. However, because this is bad old 2025 and not fun little 2015, the parameters have grown far less pleasant. A decade ago, we were happy to squabble about colors. Today, nothing less than the definition of sexual assault is on the line.
The story, as it stands, is this. On October 12, a New York DoorDash driver named Livie Rose Henderson claimed on TikTok that she had been sexually assaulted. Henderson alleges that she approached a client’s house with a delivery, only to find the door wide open and the client sprawled—naked from the waist down—on his sofa before her.
To make matters worse, Henderson then claimed that she was being silenced. She says her DoorDash account was deactivated without explanation. The police refused to investigate. She claims social-media platforms kept taking down her videos. Suddenly, what began as an ugly transgression ballooned into a terrifying conspiracy about a young woman being gagged by a patriarchal system weaponized against her. Upon hearing her tale of injustice, the Internet became outraged.
But then came the counter-argument. DoorDash explained that it had deactivated Henderson’s account because she filmed the customer in his own house without his permission and shared his information online. It emerged that the client had asked for the delivery to be left outside his door and was asleep at the time of delivery. This, some claimed, could explain why the police were not interested in pursuing an arrest. It was less a sexual assault, they said, and more the story of a woman barging into some guy’s home and then filming his genitals without his knowledge or consent.
And thus the seeds of a classic online implosion were sowed. There is a victim here, but their identity depends entirely on the worldview of the reader. Perhaps you think this is a disgusting case of male privilege gone awry; the tale of a predatory man who gets a kick out of exposing himself to young women. Or maybe this whole grubby affair is indicative of social justice gone haywire; a woman invading a man’s privacy and uploading his junk to the Internet for clicks.
Should you wish, you could literally waste weeks of your life pursuing every single argument down every possible rivulet of conspiracy and still stagger away without a shred of conclusive evidence either way. Some online users claim to have seen a longer video, where Henderson pushes the man’s door open for a better look. Others claim videos showed the door was open when she arrived. But these videos, if they exist at all, have been buried under the din of 24-7 performative outrage. The scale of it is dizzying, like the zodiac remade for TikTok.
Over on Reddit, the ramparts are already a mile high. For every commenter announcing that the customer is guilty of public lewdness, another will be adamant that you cannot break the law if you’re asleep in your own home. “He’s a pervert!” one will cry. “So should I cut off my penis or not?” another will respond, albeit less helpfully.
And this goes deep. Follow the wrong path for even a second too long and you’ll find yourself stumbling into a long and vicious branched-off argument about the mechanics of screen doors and how they prove beyond all doubt that Henderson is either definitively right or definitively wrong.
X, as you would expect, is even more of a roiling hell pit on the subject, with every “I wholeheartedly believe this man is a fucking perv” being met by an equal and opposite “It’s not a surprise the mentally deranged DoorDash girl … is a Democrat.”
The few among us interested in conclusive proof might have to wait. Henderson has speculated online that she might sue DoorDash, and there are whispers that the customer might sue Henderson in turn. If this happens—and it is still only an if—then the sunlight of due process might nudge the facts of the story out into the open.
But for everyone else, the froth-headed Internet users willing to act as prosecution and expert witness in their own yowling trials, things are a little more damning. Viewed from afar, it’s easy to see the whole affair as a microcosm of how fast-twitch partisanship based on incomplete information has ruined everything good about the world.
At least with the Dress, the matter could be put to bed as soon as someone thought to ask Roman Originals what color it actually was. You sense that the tale of the DoorDash girl is destined to go the same way that everything else does in 2025, with everyone screeching abuse at everyone else until they explode.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
