RielleUK: The Gap Between Impulse and Catastrophe... (27.4.26)
RielleUK: The Gap Between Impulse and Catastrophe... (27.4.26)
I came across the story of Klaudia Zakrzewska (Klaudia - left in picture) and Gabrielle Carrington (Rielle - right in picture) on social media. Although I know very little about the "influencer" world (I have virtually no interest), I've found myself following it with a kind of grim attention as my brain tries to make sense of one awful moment of drunken rage and a lifetime of consequences.
The facts, as far as they are publicly known, are these. In the early hours of Sunday 19 April, Klaudia Zakrzewska, a 32-year-old Polish-born influencer known online as Klaudiaglam, was outside the Inca nightclub in Soho after a night out with friends. There was a heated argument with another woman, Gabrielle Carrington, a 29-year-old social media personality and former X Factor contestant who uses the name RielleUK. Both of these women are competitors in a similar "influencing" space.
What happened next was captured on many videos that have been shared widely and that I will not link to here. Rielle got into a black Mercedes. She accelerated forward into the group outside the club, turning the wheel and mounting the pavement to target one woman in particular. Klaudia went under the vehicle, before the vehicle hit a building. A 58-year-old man who had been trying to unlock an e-scooter nearby suffered life-changing injuries too. Another woman was also hurt. Rielle then reverses the car back over Klaudia, before jumping out the car to remonstrate over her crumpled body further. Klaudia was taken to hospital, where she fought for six days. She died on Saturday 25 April.
When Rielle was arrested at the scene she was nearly twice the drink-drive limit. She has now been charged with murder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, dangerous driving, and drink driving. At her court appearance she made a heart sign with her hands toward supporters in the public gallery.
Two lives destroyed. One ended, one ruined beyond recovery. A man in his fifties with injuries he will carry for the rest of his life. Even worse, in the videos I see nobody attending to that man. People are literally walking over him as though he doesn't exist. I've since read he was actually robbed while lying broken on the floor. And all for what? An argument outside a nightclub at half past four in the morning that apparently stems from a pathetic "you-slept-with-my-ex" style exchange.
But to be honest who knows what the argument was about. Nobody outside that pavement does. It does not matter. There is no argument between two people outside a nightclub that justifies getting into a car and driving it into people, reversing just to make sure.
It's actually not the specific grievances of shallow beauty and lifestyle worlds that interests me, but the distance between whatever the grievance is and the low impulse response. Or rather, the absence of distance. The total collapse of the space that should exist between feeling something and acting on it...
I am a psychotherapist. I spend my share of hours sitting with people who are learning, slowly and painfully, to tolerate the gap between an impulse and an action. That gap is where almost everything important in human development happens. It is where you learn that feeling furious does not mean you have to act furiously, or that being hurt does not entitle you to hurt back. That the intensity of an emotion is not a measure of how justified it is, and so on. It's dawned on me that most of the therapeutic work I do, stripped down to its basics, involves helping people widen that gap by a few seconds, or minutes, long enough for something other than the impulse to dominate. Reflection. Consequence. An awareness that other people are real and that what you do to them cannot always be undone.
When that gap closes completely, as it did for Rielle, the consequences are catastrophic for everyone involved. Klaudia Zakrzewska is dead. Her family is grieving. Their lives have changed forever, and their chief source of pride has been extinguished cruelly. A man who was doing nothing more than standing on a pavement will live with the physical consequences for years, possibly forever. And Rielle, who from what I've seen had a career, a following, a life, is sitting in a cell facing a murder charge because something happened in her head between the argument and the car and nothing, nothing at all, intervened between the feeling and the act. If found guilty, she will likely be imprisoned for over 20 years, missing her fertility window and long forgotten, and then be walking out as a mid-50s woman on strict license for her remaining life. Some family may be gone. Friends will have long since evaporated. Even going abroad is unlikely ever again. Her entire persona has been erased, and forever, in 5 seconds.
Following the social media responses. I see the commentary around this case has been either too moralistic or too sociological, and neither seems complete to me. The moralistic response is to say that Rielle is a monster, wicked, evil. This all reveals something about influencer culture and that social media has rotted people's brains. The sociological response is to say that this is what happens when you build a culture around visibility and status without substance, when you reward people for performance rather than character. This is when the gap between who someone appears to be, and who they actually are, becomes so wide that something collapses.
Probably plenty of truth to both... But my own gnawing sense is that it's more than that. The moralistic version says: I would never do that. The sociological version says: the system did it. Neither allows that every single one of us is capable of a moment in which the gap between impulse and action closes, and the only thing that protects us is the ability that we have, built up over a lifetime, to control our impulse. The habits of restraint. The internalised awareness that actions have consequences that outlast the feeling that produced them. The basic, boring, unsexy capacity to stop. To stop, and accept the horrible friction that comes with having an impulse to do something but... not.
What strikes me about this case, and I say this without pretending to know anything about Rielle's inner life, is that the entire environment in which both women operated was one that systematically rewards the removal of friction. Social media at its most successful is frictionless self-expression. Say what you feel and react instantly, "they'll love it". Perform your emotions in real time and, no doubt, the algorithm rewards it. Restraint is invisible and therefore unrewarded. The person who pauses, considers, and decides not to post does not exist in the system. The person who erupts does.
I am not blaming social media for a death, although clearly pumping young people's heads with a non-stop drip of it is likely to be horrendously negative in terms of unintended effects. But social media didn't itself do this. A person drove a car into a crowd. That is a decision, however impaired, and it belongs to the person who made it. But I think we must ask what kind of inner life is cultivated by an environment in which the gap between feeling and expression has been deliberately and profitably eliminated, and what happens when someone formed by that environment encounters a situation where the gap between feeling and action is the only thing standing between them and irreversible catastrophe.
The answer, in this case, is that someone is dead.
I think about friction a lot in my work. I have written about it in other contexts, about how the removal of friction from professional environments allows bad ideas to spread unchallenged, about how the willingness to tolerate discomfort is what protects institutions from their own worst impulses. But the same principle applies to individual lives. Friction - pausing - is not glamorous. It is not content that would make too much sense to people like Rielle, because it does not perform well. But it is the thing that stands between a person and the worst version of themselves, and a culture that systematically removes it in the name of "authenticity" and "self-expression" or, indeed, "my truth" is building something very dangerous indeed.
Klaudia was 32. She was someone's daughter. She was a person, not a cautionary tale, and I do not want to use her death to make any kind of cheap point. But I can't look at this story without seeing what I see in my consulting room, operating at a scale and speed via technologies that therapy struggles to adequately address: the catastrophic cost of a life lived without the internal structures that slow a person down long enough to choose differently.
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