Photo via jacobgeittmann2/TikTok
April 26, 2021, 1:34 pm
A TikTok video showing a grown man following and insulting a teenage boy in a full-length red prom dress quickly went viral and resulted in widespread accusations of homophobia toward the man, who was soon identified as telemedicine company VisuWell CEO Sam Johnson.
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The video was recorded by young Jacob Geittmann, who was celebrating prom with his boyfriend Dalton Stevens, who wore the dress as a form of expression and to help “break the stigma around men wearing dresses.”
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Johnson can be seen in the video following Stevens around, standing too close for comfort even if he did have a mask on (which he didn’t), with a creepy, leering little smile as he insults the child on his special day.
“I chose what I wanna wear so you can f— off,” Stevens says as the video begins.
“Think he looks gross?” says Geittmann as he films Johnson’s doofus grin. “Looks disgusting? Yeah?”
Stevens tries to walk away from Johnson, like an adult might do, but Johnson follows him, apparently not done bothering the teenage boy on his prom.
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“You look like…” Johnson starts.
“I look like what?!” Stevens shouts, clearly fed up with the harassment. “F— off, you f—ing b—h!”
“You look like an idiot,” says Johnson.
“Get the f— away from me!” says Stevens.
Johnson then seems to notice Geittmann filming him again and attempts to hit the teen and/or his phone, nearly hitting Stevens in the face as he was again trying to escape the man.
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“No sir, I can f—ing record you all I want,” says Geittmann. “Keep talking. You look like a moron.”
Geittmann continues to film Johnson smirking as it sounds like a number of adults have approached him to get him to be an adult and leave the children alone.
“It’s just prom. It’s kids, it’s a bunch of kids,” says one voice. “Come on, dude.”
Johnson is apparently still staring creepily at Stevens, who is trying to enjoy himself regardless.
“I’m sorry, I’m gorgeous,” he says, correctly.
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“Are you?” asks Johnson.
The adults continue to try and calm the situation down and suggest that Stevens moves away from Johnson, which he had clearly been trying to do already.
“He’s the one who’s following us, we moved,” Stevens can be heard saying. “Like, we moved from over there to over here.”
Meanwhile, Johnson keeps up the creepy smile-and-stare as the video ends.
According to Newsweek, Johnson denies harassing the kids or being homophobic. In a response to the outlet’s inquiry, he claimed that he approached the teens to ask them to stop swearing loudly in front of his kids.
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“We had just sat down for dinner at this restaurant that we frequent, and I was returning from the restroom when I was presented with their loud cursing,” Johnson said. “Making it about the dress was their idea and they edited out most of the exchange.”
This, of course, is entirely contradicted by the video as well as witness accounts of the incident. According to Geittmann, hotel staff eventually kicked the CEO off of their property for causing such a disturbance. He also says that before the video began, Johnson came up and started harassing Stevens specifically about the dress and nothing else.
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“This man comes up and he’s about an inch away from my boyfriend and he says, ‘What are you wearing?’ And he’s like, ‘A dress, why?’” explained Geittmann in a follow-up video. “And he’s like, ‘Why are you wearing that? You shouldn’t be wearing that.’”
After being dismissed by Stevens who correctly said that he can wear what he wants to, Geittmann says that Johnson went full homophobe and tried multiple times to hit the phone out of Geittmann’s hands when he started recording.
“So this man starts going on and on, throwing insults at him, ‘You look disgusting, you look ridiculous, you look like an idiot, men shouldn’t be wearing this.’ All this homophobic banter.”
Johnson and his Tennessee company have been resoundingly condemned for this creepy homophobic and transphobic behavior.
*First Published: April 26, 2021, 1:34 pm
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