In Her Defense is conscious of the issues that stem from Britain’s modern social class system, especially when it comes to the pursuit of lifestyles that are typically framed as privileged. Malicka achieves this by placing a working-class protagonist into an upper-class milieu and forcing her to deal with the financial demands this situation makes of her. This point is pushed even further once Gus meets Jean, who understands how to leverage Gus’s insecurities, largely the product of her social class, to achieve her own goals.

Gus’s financial capacity is one of the defining traits of her character, which contrasts with Mary’s privilege. Where Mary comes from a celebrity family that has never seen cost as an obstacle, Gus is ashamed of the fact that her father is a groundskeeper and her mother works in a school science lab, as illustrated by how she misrepresents them when speaking about them with Mary. Even if she has the raw talent to lead an artistic life, Gus struggles through her residency in Rome and takes on the modeling job as a source of income to support her lifestyle. The fact that her parents cannot understand her career choice underscores the gap between her background and her desired lifestyle, as their imperative is focused on transcending their class status. Gus’s parents are always asking her how she will make money or make things that are considered “useful” because they understand artistic lifestyles as being privileged.

Consequently, Gus cannot afford Jean’s services, but it does not mean that she is less deserving of therapy. Gus needs therapy to work through the issues created by her childhood trauma, but because she cannot afford it, she must take advantage of the goodwill Jean is offering her. When Jean suddenly raises the question of money, Gus resolves to plunge herself into debt in order to placate Jean and preserve their relationship. This is how Jean turns debt, a product of Gus’s attempt to transcend her social class, into a tool to exploit Gus.

Jean encourages Gus to channel her resentment for the upper classes into helping Jean build her following. During the trial, Gus is forced to admit that she referred two of Mary’s friends, Decca and Bea, to Jean because she felt it would help her to sustain Jean’s approval of her. Gus is implicated in Jean’s practice, but she operates under different motivations. Where Jean is drawn to exploit the wealth of her clients, Gus is drawn to the allure of Jean’s guidance, which, coupled with her inability to pay for it, requires her to become complicit in Jean’s system of abuse.

At the end of the novel, Gus overcomes the pressure of her class identity and realizes that she did nothing to vindicate or affirm herself by helping Jean. As absolution, she works to pursue reparations for her actions by bringing Jean to justice, giving the evidence of Jean’s witness tampering to Lucy to help her seek justice for the death of Oriel. As she recognizes the harm that she helped Jean perpetuate, she comes to see that Jean manipulated her insecurities, especially those that are a product of her working-class background, illustrating how her social class was weaponized and exploited for Jean’s success.