The beating stopped after a fellow passenger intervened. Instead of cowering, Coupé decided to go public, displaying her bruised face and blackened eye to the media and reporting her assailant to the police. She spoke out, she says, so she could tell the world she was not the only person who had been attacked for their size. “Fat people are often more afraid of taking public transportation than they are of eating a live octopus. That is where you are trapped,” she says.