When Nautica Malone woke up on the morning of January 7th, 2025, one can’t help but wonder what he was thinking. As he drove to the Bikini Beans coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, did he have any clue what the next few days would look like? Did he think about his wife? His two young daughters? How would his mother react? In the wake of the incident, and in lieu of vital information related to it, it’s become easy to linger on questions like these. What is known for certain, though, is that the barista working the drive-through that morning started recording the second she saw Nautica’s car. In the video, Nautica is seen smiling at the camera as he is greeted by the filming barista. At first, things are copacetic. She asks him if he has ever been to Bikini Beans before. He answers yes. With that confirmation, the barista pushes the camera in, exclaiming “Sir! Unacceptable,” frightening Mr. Malone who speeds away in his black Dodge. The video ends just as the barista yells for 911 to be called. But what was it he did? It took me about five minutes of closely examining the clip before I noticed that Nautica Malone was not wearing any pants, one hand resting in between his thighs. Three days later, the video would go viral, amassing millions of views from people who would have otherwise never heard the name Nautica Malone in their lives.¹ Less than twenty-four hours after the incident was posted, Nautica Malone took his black Dodge to an empty parking lot, called his brother, and shot himself in the head. He was twenty-seven years old.²

In the wake of Nautica Malone’s death, the question of blame has become unavoidable in online discourse. While scores of internet users view Nautica’s suicide as unfortunate, their commiseration extends no further than just that, many going as far as saying that Malone “got what was coming to him” because of his misconduct. This brazenly punitive angle is perhaps the easiest to adopt as it allows the masses to reconcile the sudden suicide of a beloved husband and father of two by framing his crime as nullifying these virtues. Conversely, others have taken up a belligerent stance against the barista for uploading the video of Nautica sexually harassing her. In a Facebook tirade, Nautica Malone’s mother even claimed that the barista should be brought to justice for “killing” her son.³ While it is almost undeniable that Nautica Malone killed himself because of the shameful video going viral, blaming the barista who filmed it is horribly misguided at best and, at worst, a sinister attempt to use Malone’s death to push an unrelated misogynistic agenda. Rather than continue to point fingers and add to the corpus of banality already surrounding this case, I think it would be more generative to instead critique the cultural conditions that led to Nautica Malone’s death in the first place. 

The incident in many ways epitomizes the prominent failings of contemporary American society—gun violence, suicide, porn addiction, and, most crucially, a hypocritical cult of shame. The barista should be spared the overwhelmingly intense criticism for her posting the video, as she is merely following the pulse of our fractured culture. While her decision to film Nautica Malone may have been rooted in an instinctual desire for safety or legal protection, her decision to post the video to social media was the result of an unnatural learned behavior, carefully developed, whether she knows it or not, through years of exposure to similar digital public humiliations. What else should one do with a video as scintillating as the barista’s but post it for the amusement of millions of strangers? After all, that is what the algorithm rewards.

It is virtually impossible to scroll through a popular social media platform without coming across a video similar to the barista’s. A person caught in a compromising situation posted without their consent for the explicit purpose of public ridicule. Our closest traditional analog to this type of content would seemingly be the paparazzi gossip “journalism” of TMZ and Perez Hilton, yet even this falls short as a true comparison. The barista (notice that she has maintained her anonymity throughout this whole ordeal) is not looking for financial compensation or fame, and the subject of her video is not a celebrity, but a private individual. In this way, we can better understand these types of videos as something far more sinister than a form of digitized playground gossip. These digital humiliations are, in many ways, the natural extension of the surveillance state currently pervading our daily lives. Though presented as comedic entertainment, they function as instruments of social control. When taken to their natural extreme, the subject committing suicide—a fate in which Nautica is just one of many–these videos take on the form of a modern-day public execution. 

While this comparison may initially seem over-exaggerated or hysterical, examining these public shaming videos through the lens of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish reveals striking similarities between the public executions of the old world and our new digital iteration. The key to accepting this crucial comparison is to move beyond our fixed perception of public execution as merely a hanging or death by guillotine, and instead recognize its greater psychical work as a spectacle. It is the audience that is the most integral part of the public execution; the method of execution itself is actually quite trivial. Whether by blade or by camera, it is all the same motivation. In this way, Foucault considered public executions to function not just as punishment, but as performance.⁴ When Charles Dickens described witnessing a hanging, he did not find the sight of the condemned criminal as “inconceivably awful” as he did the “wickedness and levity” of the immense crowd gathered to watch the execution.⁵ These two indictments of the conception that the public execution is, at all, a means of sufficient legal retribution make clear an incontrovertible truth: the digital execution, just as the physical execution that proceeded it, is nothing more than an antiquated relic of humanity’s primitive thirst for vengeance. 

This obsession with vengeance becomes undeniably apparent when scrolling through the numerous comments left on such videos. The sentiment that Nautica Malone somehow “deserved” to die because of his crime is not isolated to that incident. The most popular of these public execution videos are typically the work of self-appointed pedophile hunters who spend their days online pretending to be teenage girls in order to bait mentally handicapped men into meeting up with them. In these videos, the alleged pedophile is cornered in a public setting and, typically, beaten senseless. Clips of the baited pedos–men with often visual disabilities–getting punched in the face, body-slammed to the ground, or brought to tears generate tens of millions of views daily. This is because, to those who film the videos as well as the audience who eagerly spectates, alleged pedophiles have lost their humanity. The visual spectacle of these cartoonishly cruel punishments is what Foucault would describe, simply, as a kind of terror. The violence is permissible only to the extent that it masquerades itself as a form of justice, always purporting to act as some kind of deterrent to future offenders. And yet, this seemingly iron-clad defense blows wide open when one considers that most of the alleged pedophiles in these videos say something to the effect of “I’ve seen your videos before” when caught.⁶ It is just this bleak reality that creates our desire to disidentify with the videos’ subjects in the first place. The human beings in these types of videos, criminals and all, are clearly beholden to illicit addictions that completely overpower their reasoning. While shame may potentially be a valuable method of deterrent for a crime like theft, putting the spotlight on a mentally unwell individual in order to humiliate and torture them in front of an audience of bloodthirsty strangers simply does not deter other mentally unwell individuals from repeating the transgression, as their distorted psyche will compel them to act out their perverse desires even when they know what risk potentially awaits for them on the other side. Rather than confront this complicated and disturbing reality, we instead disidentify with the offenders completely, saving our psyche from any passing realization that we are just as human as the tarred and feathered perverts being thrown around for our entertainment on our phone screen. 

In a statement issued in the wake of Nautica Malone’s death, Bikini Beans CEO Ben Lyles claimed that while Nautica Malone’s death was unfortunate, he was still a criminal and that the safety of Bikini Beans employees is always his top priority. If one were to consider these men in relation to the roles they inhabit in the moralistic fable currently playing out over the internet, the first instinct would be to label them as opposites. Nautica Malone, is, naturally, the villain, the bad guy, the pervert. Ben Lyles, then, should be something akin to a hero, or, at least, a protector, valiantly fighting for his baristas’ safety. But a careful study of Mr. Lyles’ public image reveals that perhaps these two supposed opposites aren’t so different after all. Both men have two young daughters and a loving wife and yet, one of them will never get to spend time with them again while the other one gets to continue posting matching outfit family pictures from Disney World like nothing ever happened. In Nautica Malone’s suicide note, he begged that his wife would somehow forgive him for the fateful “mistake” he made at Bikini Beans and to not let it desecrate the love they shared. In an interview with Peter Meyerhoff, Lyles spent a large portion of time discussing his belief in second chances accented by his admission of an adolescence marked by criminal activity and, in his words, mistakes.⁷ Meyerhoff, an ex-felon and former white supremacist who spent 12 years in prison for a plethora of crimes, eagerly agreed.⁸

Why, then, should Ben Lyles and Peter Meyerhoff be forgiven for their mistakes, and Nautica Malone be sentenced to death because of his? If it is truly just the provocative nature of a sexual transgression, Ben Lyles is certainly not safe either. Ex-baristas recall that on occasion Lyles would try to coerce them into having sex with him and his wife.⁹ In the aforementioned interview, Lyles speaks flippantly about a bizarre story of his and his wife’s first time having sex when they were both in high school involving his wife’s mom calling him after and accusing him of raping her daughter. A journalist reported that Lyles openly admitted to intentionally hiring young and impressionable women—not only for the alleged purposes of sexual misconduct but also for manipulation and wage theft, as detailed in a class action lawsuit taken out against him by over 100 employees.¹⁰ In this way, Nautica Malone’s death was one of the best things to happen to Lyles this year as it served as the perfect way to simultaneously deflect from his own accusations while also opportunistically using one man’s demise to reassert himself as a figure of strength and rectitude in his community. If Ben Lyles truly cared about protecting his baristas from predators as passionately as he claims, he might have also found it necessary to address the numerous other instances of harassment at his stores—including a dozen other drive-by flashings and a horrifying incident in which a barista was nearly kidnapped straight from the drive-through booth. Of course, though, these incidents didn’t generate nearly as much commotion as Malone’s relatively tame offense, so Lyles found no business interest in commenting. 

It is very likely that Ben Lyles, just like the punitive, vengeful internet commenters, is projecting his own shame onto Nautica Malone to avoid reckoning with the fact that he has created a business that is only able to sustain itself off of the perpetual subjugation of young women who he has purposefully put into unsafe situations for financial gain. This narrative does not play well against the simplified fairy tale one with heroes and villains and good and evil often parroted online. Legend has it, though, that if one closes their eyes and focuses hard enough, they can still hear Ben Lyles’s prolonged sigh of relief upon the realization that a series of headlines featuring the words BIKINI BEANS and SEXUAL HARASSMENT doesn’t also include his name tacked on to it. 

Nautica Malone is not a name I should know. In all honesty, it’s probably a name hardly anyone should know. A man who was most prominently regarded in his obituary for his enjoyment of college basketball and HVAC repair knowledge should not be the center of an internet debate surrounding his culpability in what would amount to be a video that would end his life.¹¹ It is nothing other than the symptom of a deeply sick society that we should find ourselves knowing Nautica Malone’s name. A sick society that gives rise to a postmodern absurdity like a drive-through bikini coffee shop while clinging to an antiquated, puritanical sense of moral righteousness when confronted with others’ publicly exposed moments of weakness. A sick society that would choose to watch a man beaten senseless if it in any way allows him to self-protectively project his shame onto others. In South Carolina, a man was just executed by firing squad. The first execution of this kind in fifteen years.¹² Last week in Louisiana, a man was just killed by the state via nitrogen gas, a form of lethal injection so torturous its use is banned on animals.¹³ Both men were criminals. Both crimes were far more heinous than any of those that the public shaming videos typically cover. And yet, the same banal thirst for vengeance and misguided claims of justice are at play here as much as they are in the digital realm. It is our only hope that we can one day transcend this petulant desire for vengeance and overturn public execution in both the physical and digital space. Nothing good can possibly come from a government that mandates the death of its own citizens. Surely, then much worse will come from a vengeful populous who revels in the digital destruction of their fellow man. While many will scoff at this message and dismiss it as overly sympathetic to criminals, arguing that it shields them from accountability and denies the public justice, it remains my contention that if these online instances are any indication of what’s to come, the world will become far crueler to all of us, regardless of our perceived moral superiority. To those who disagree, then, I encourage you to go on and continue to enjoy your pedophile hunter videos, public meltdown compilations, and inside look into the destruction of lives you never should have been involved with in the first place. However, do not be surprised when, one day, you turn on your phone and find that the latest subject of humiliation—the person whose life is being ruined for the unfettered amusement of others—is yourself.

1. Dailymail.com, Alyssa Guzman For. “Shocking End for ‘pervert’ Who Was Shamed by Bikini Barista for Flashing Her at Drive-Thru.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers
2. Staff, TMZ. “Nautica Malone Called Brother before Suicide, Left Note for Wife.”
3. “Nautica Malone’s Bikini Beans Incident Explained.” Yahoo! News, Yahoo!
4. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish the Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1979.
5. Dickens, Charles. “Marie and Frederick Manning Executed for Murder.” Charles Dickens Witnesses a Public Execution, David A Perdue, 1 Apr. 2022
6. Toler, Aric, et al. “Online ‘pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent – and Going Viral,” The New York Times, March 26, 2025.
7. Meyerhoff, Peter. “Peter Meyerhoff Interview With Ben Lyles.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2WJ2UE5iR4&t=3190s.
8. Meyerhoff, Peter. “Peter Meyerhoff Bio.” Peter Meyerhoff.
9. R/Phoenix on Reddit: Bikini Beans Coffee Shop Owners Accused of Harassing Workers from Multiple Past Employees !!!.
10. Kelety, Josh. “Life’s Not a Beach at Bikini Beans Coffee, Former Employees Say,” Phoenix New Times, Phoenix New Times, 11 Aug. 2020.
11. “Obituary Information for Nautica Thaddeus Furches Malone,” Obituary Information For.
12. Max Matza, “Brad Sigmon: Double Murderer Is First US Inmate Executed by Firing Squad in 15 Years,” BBC News, BBC, 8 Mar. 2025.
13. “Louisiana Executes Man with Nitrogen Gas after 15-Year Pause,” NBCNews.Com