Woman Accused Of Telling Black Couple At Brooklyn Dog Park, 'Stay In Your Hood'
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Video of a woman accused of a racially motivated verbal attack against a couple at a dog park in Williamsburg is sparking outrage on social media.
Frederick Joseph was in disbelief, repeating the words he said were directed at him by a person in the park Saturday night.
"Stay in our hood? I'm sorry, what?" Joseph said.
That woman, who we are not naming because she has not been officially identified, gave Joseph the finger and attempted to knock the phone out of his hand.
"She's like, 'You're not from around here. Go back to your hood. Stay in your hood. Stay in your hood,'" Joseph told CBS2's Thalia Perez. "So I'm like, 'Stay in my hood?' Right, like? 'You're being racist right now,' and she's like, 'I'm not being racist.'"
Joseph says that part of the confrontation was not caught on camera. He says the woman was upset because she confused his dog with another dog that had been barking loudly.
"I tried to explain, like, 'I think you have the wrong dog,' and then she just starts, like, going completely out of left field," Joseph said. "At that point, I'm like, look, what you're doing is deeply, deeply offensive, deeply racist, and I want to get this on camera because I don't want there to be any misconceptions about what took place here."
"She was saying a lot of things, and that's when, like, finally, like, 'You guys need to take your dog out of here. You people shouldn't even be here,'" Joseph's fiancée, Porsche Landon, said.
Steve Tracy was also at the park with his golden retriever and says he had just met Joseph and Landon and they were all making small talk while the dogs ran around. He can also be seen at the end of the recording.
"You were right here watching this entire thing. Did she just not just stand here and tell us to stay in our hood?" Joseph asks in the video.
"She did," Tracy says.
"As those words were coming out and things started to unfold, it was pretty obvious to me, like, this is... this is not OK," Tracy told Perez.
Joseph, an author who has written a book called "The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person," first posted the video to Twitter, where it picked up steam almost immediately with some offering support and others quickly working to track down the woman they labeled as a "Karen."
When asked for her response to the dog park incident, she told CBS2, "No thank you. No comment."
The woman has reportedly lost her job over the incident.
Derek Anderson, the CEO of Bevy, believed to be her employer, was swift to take action, offering an apology to the couple and then announcing on Twitter, "Yesterday an employee engaged in behavior contrary to our values and has been terminated."
"I think that it's important that people know that there are consequences for their actions," Joseph said.
CBS2's Thalia Perez contributed to this report. Editor's note: This story first appeared on September 26, 2021.