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When the Mob Comes for a Special Needs Individual
The Daily Caller has a heartbreaking and eye-opening piece I wanted to flag for Ricochet members and readers. Hannah Grossman describes the real story behind one of those race videos you may have seen around.
On a midsummer day in July, Darsell Obregon ducked under an apartment building to shelter herself from the rain while waiting for an Uber. Minutes later, the front door swung open and out walked a 19-year-old girl who demanded that Obregon leave the premises immediately. The resident’s name is Arabelle Torres, a 19-year-old student at Brooklyn College who also has autism.
“I came downstairs and a woman was standing as I am right now and wouldn’t leave,” Torres, who was describing the seeds of events that led her life to change, said to me while standing outside of her home in Park Slope. What might have been an unremarkable high-strung incident that occurs hundreds of times a day in New York City, ended up becoming a fake news story that race-baited an incident without credible evidence of bigotry.
“Hey, ma’am, this is private property. Could you please move?” Torres recounts saying to Obregon, an assistant to fashion model Ashley Graham, who “just flat-out refused” to leave the premises.
“After about ten times of me saying, ‘Ma’am, go. This is private property,’ [Obregon] still refused. So I called the cops,” Torres said. “As a person with autism, I [was] scared. When somebody is blocking me from leaving … it is a big problem. And I was alone in that situation.”
As Torres dialed 911, Obregon whipped out her phone and began filming. Later that evening — Torres was at a Broadway show — the words “worthless skank” popped up on her phone. As dozens more messages poured in, she found out that Obregon had posted the exchange on social media accounts accompanied with hashtags associated with race-related events (even though Obregon is not black).
Since the incident, Torres reported she has experienced extreme distress, still receives threatening messages on social media, and has attempted suicide several times. Grossman went to the trouble of tracking down all of the journalists who wrote about the exchange in racial terms and reported,
Emily Crane’s story covering Obregon’s and Torres’ interaction at the Daily Mail was deleted without any sort of retraction. Others still have not corrected their stories (Newsweek, Ebony Magazine, etc.). Others made changes to the headline from “white woman calls the cops on black woman” to “woman calls cops on woman” without explaining on the bottom of the article that the original post was corrected, as journalistic ethics require.
The story reminded me of one in the Washington Post that stuck with me since it was published almost a year ago. In it, a woman with a slightly disheveled son with autism had the police called because of a case of bedhead and ill-fitting clothing.
The difference between the two stories is this: the police had enough common sense to feel shame about having to check in on the situation, while reporters fed the social media mob with delight, without a tinge of apprehension.
When the story broke, I remember seeing reports that the caller had autism; in the video, it was clear the agitation she exhibited indicated there was more going on than was being reported. And the sole victim of the entire incident remains Torres; with no consequences for the journalists carrying the pitchforks.
Published in Journalism
For some time, my Totally Existing Detective Friend has lamented internet videos of police actions that look bad. His reason was that you’re only seeing the narrative in terms of what the person sharing that video wants you to see, that the story around the video may have more details than presented. Very similar circumstances here. We have a media that is begging us to accept that the US is so hopelessly racist to a nigh cancerous degree and actual details in what’s going on in any given situation is less important to them than the racist narrative.
Bethany,
A mob is a mob. They might be social but they wouldn’t know what justice was if they bumped their tiny heads right into it. Give a mob a cell phone and they use it the same way they use everything else, to cause innocent people injustice.
Regards,
Jim
Guess I had better not go home tonight until after sunset, then.
I can’t figure out why this is a news story at all.
“Person is jerk to another person” happens way too frequently for it to be “news.”
I await the inevitable lawsuit(s).
I follow Ms Mandel on Ricochet, but was not notified of this post. I’m glad I was lucky enough to come across it anyway.
Yeah, I gotta say, I’m not getting warm fuzzies for anyone involved.
Ms. Obregon should purchase an umbrella. She should also understand that if a resident asks her to leave their front door, or their porch she must leave. The same would apply to any business she enters, if she is told to leave.
Quite true.
Also true is that there is little harm in either letting someone shelter on your porch on the other side of a locked door, or offering that person the lend of an umbrella, a newspaper, a plastic bag.
Their selfishness has cost everyone something.
There were certainly no winners here. I would suggest that Ms. Obregon is self-absorbed, entitled, and vindictive. She didn’t leave and recorded the encounter to post on social media. Self-absorbed because she feels that her life is so important that what happened to her must be seen. Entitled because she had a right to stay. Vindictive because she decided to get even by posting her pathetic encounter. She obviously knew her audience, because they responded exactly like she did.