At the United Nations’ official commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on Nov. 25, actress and writer Azie Tesfai delivered one of the most searing speeches of this year’s 16 Days of Activism campaign.
She shared a personal account of digital stalking that exposed the widening gap between online abuse and legal protection.
“There is a specific terror in being watched by someone without a face,” she said, capturing the haunting reality familiar to millions of women who face threats, stalking, and coercive control through their phones every day.
The message landed because Tesfai wasn’t speaking in abstraction. She was speaking as a survivor.
Digital violence does not just stay online
Tesfai revealed that she has had three stalkers in her life — two of whom weaponized digital tools to control, track, and terrorize her.
Her first stalker, she said, slipped into her life through a lie so ordinary it still unsettles her: he contacted a friend, claiming he had lost her number.
What followed were years of late-night messages — thousands of them, sent between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. — that escalated from obsession to rage. Once he described exactly what she had worn that day, Tesfai said she understood the full horror of being watched by someone she could not identify.
The police repeatedly dismissed her reports. No name. No physical contact. No crime.
One officer advised her to buy mace and learn to shoot a gun.
“Translation: protect yourself,” she said.
What followed was a life of self-imposed restriction; carefully chosen streets, switchblades in her bag, a constant awareness that safety was her responsibility alone.
A second stalker and the same excuse
Years later, in another country for a Comic-Con event, Tesfai learned she had a second stalker — a man who believed they were in a relationship because he had seen her on TV. The authorities again told her nothing could be done.
His messages, obsessive, explicit, and directed at her by name, were categorized as free speech.
“I walked in expecting safety and instead I was questioned,” she told the audience. “When a threat is credible, victim safety must matter more than a stalker’s claim to privacy.”
The solutions offered were not justice, but survival tactics: Stay with friends. Travel quietly. Shrink.
Tesfai admitted she still follows much of that advice today.
A family tragedy: “If it could happen to her, it could happen to any of us”
Her testimony took a devastating turn as she spoke about the killing of her cousin — “my sister in all the ways that mattered” — who was murdered by her fiancé.
In that grief, Tesfai said she saw a straight line connecting digital violence to femicide.
“There is a permission structure that has been created through digital violence,” she said, “enabling men to see women as objects and possessions.”
Eventually, using her own resources, she identified her first stalker: a stranger with a documented history of severe violence against women.
Digital threats, she argued, are not separate from physical danger; they are precursors to it.
A global legal blind spot
Tesfai’s core argument was direct: The law has not kept up with the reality of digital harm.
Most countries still require physical proximity or physical contact before police can act. Online threats often fall into a gray area — treated as speech, annoyance, or “not serious enough.”
Platforms, she said, profit from the ecosystems where harassment festers but bear little responsibility for prevention.
“We deserve laws that protect us while we are still alive to be protected,” she said, drawing loud applause.
A call for accountability and a refusal to disappear
Her remarks underscored a central contradiction: women are told to speak up about abuse, yet when they do, they are told nothing can be done unless the stalker crosses a physical line.
Until laws change, she said, women are forced to make themselves smaller to stay alive.
“Become less visible. Shrink. Disappear,” she recounted.
“And honestly, I still follow most of that advice.”
But Tesfai said she chose to speak publicly — despite ongoing threats — for her cousin, for herself, and for all the women who lack the resources she had.
A moment that could reshape the conversation
Her testimony adds pressure to a growing global movement pushing governments to update cyberstalking and online harassment laws. Advocates argue that digital abuse cannot be treated as a virtual problem when its consequences are profoundly physical.
From the stage of the United Nations, Tesfai framed the issue plainly:
Digital violence is violence. Digital stalking is stalking. Digital threats are threats.
And the world’s laws, she said, must finally respond as if women’s lives depend on it, because too often, they do.
