'You touch children': Viral video shows 'Karen' unleash abusive rant against lesbian couple in Starbucks
CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA: An elderly Starbucks customer in Florida is seen in a viral video unleashing a homophobic rant and accusing a lesbian couple of "touching children." The cringe-worthy TikTok video, captioned “Karen in the wild,” has garnered more than 7 million views after it was posted by Cassie Urry on Sunday, March 12.
In the video, the unidentified blonde woman, who is seen wearing a lime green dress, could be heard accusing the couple of grooming children, raping and calling them evil. The hate speech even forced staff and other patrons at the coffee shop to condemn the wild allegations.
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What really happened?
Urry and her girlfriend Lorrin Skrbec were on vacation and had traveled from Toledo to Miami for a cruise to the Bahamas. The couple stopped at a Starbucks in Coral Gables and "saw [a] woman saying, like, a lot of racist things and a lot of racial slurs,” Urry said. “There [were] Asian customers there. And she had said to them that they were creations of the devil, and that everybody in the Starbucks was sitting in the presence of the devil and not doing anything about it,” reported Daily Beast.
The woman also spewed anti-Asian slurs and made COVID-19-related hate speech, which prompted Skrbec to intervene and Urry decided to record the humiliating moment. “Is lesbianism OK?” the woman asks. “No, it isn’t because you touch children. You rape children. Yes, because you’re evil.” While customers and staff are heard in the background reacting to the rant, the woman did not back out. She went on to taunt the couple for recording and claimed they didn't know who she is. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the woman is heard telling the couple.
'She’s no longer welcome'
At the end of the video, the store manager intervens and confronts the woman to a corner. Urry said she and her girlfriend were both taken aback by the incident. “We were both in shock a little bit. It was weird,” she said. “I didn’t quite know how to respond. I was feeling angry and feeling a lot of emotions, but I think just I knew realistically that escalating the situation wasn’t going to get us anywhere. And you just can’t reason with some people. So we just had to keep our cool. We didn't really want to think about [the incident] or deal with it while we were on vacation." “We just had to forget about it during the time-being and enjoy our trip and focus on each other,” said Urry.
Furthermore, Urry added the starbucks employees made sure to check on them following the interaction with the woman. A spokesperson for starbucks claimed the company does not “tolerate any form of discrimination in [its] stores.” “We take a lot of pride in in creating a warm and welcoming environment, and we we expect both our...employees...as well as customers in our store to uphold those values,” spokesperson Sam Jefferies said. “Obviously, when you’ve seen the video, the way that customer behaved was unacceptable, and she’s no longer welcome in our store.”