keyonharrold/Instagram
December 28, 2020, 6:51 am*
A racist encounter involving a woman falsely accusing a Black teenager of stealing her phone has gone viral, and it’s pretty ugly.
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Keyon Harrold, a successful jazz trumpeter who regularly works with all sorts of famous pop artists, was staying at Arlo Hotel in Soho, New York, with his 14-year-old son over Christmas. On the morning of the 26th, they came down from their room to get brunch when Harrold says they were accosted in the lobby by a woman who insisted the teen’s iPhone was actually her own.
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At the start of Harrold’s video, the woman had already gotten the hotel manager involved and was demanding to look at the boy’s phone.
“Take the case off, that’s mine,” she insists, lurking anxiously behind the manager, who constantly tells her to move back.
As Harrold tells the woman to go turn on Find My iPhone and deal with her problem elsewhere, the manager approaches his son and asks to see his phone.
“No, you can’t,” Harrold interrupts.
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“I’m the manager of the hotel,” the man replies.
“I don’t care. This is my son. Didn’t you see me just come downstairs out of the f—ing elevator?” Harrold asks. “My son has nothing to do with her.”
The woman then jumps in front of the doors to the hotel and insists the teen isn’t leaving. Father and son walk in a different direction and the increasingly frantic woman chases them, and ultimately appears to attack Harrold before the video cuts out.
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“This incident went on for five more minutes, me protecting my son from this lunatic,” he wrote on Instagram. “She scratched me; she tackled and grabbed him. He is a child!!!”
Harrold’s frustrations were compounded by the fact that the woman wasn’t even a guest at the hotel — according to his post, she had checked out three days earlier.
“Then… her phone was magically returned by an Uber driver a few minutes after this incident. No apology from her after this traumatic situation to my son, not me. No apologies from the establishment,” he said.
After footage of the altercation went viral, Arlo Hotels eventually shared a statement on Instagram, saying they are “deeply disheartened about the recent incident of baseless accusation, prejudice, and assault against an innocent guest of Arlo Hotel.” They also claim the hotel manager “promptly” called the police on the woman, though the teen’s mother says the security guard let the woman leave before law enforcement arrived.
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The woman has not yet been publicly identified.
*First Published: December 28, 2020, 6:45 am
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