A week ago, Amy Cooper, a.k.a. “Central Park Karen,” went viral for all the wrong reasons after she called the police on a black man, claiming he was threatening her life while video footage showed she was in no danger. Cooper lost her job and her dog following the incident, which has served as a cautionary tale to white women everywhere, teaching them, once and for all, that it is not OK to use the police as your personal black people exterminator...
Nah, just kidding; another white woman did pretty much the exact same thing in another New York City park on Friday.
Complex reports that Karen the Sequel, who has been identified as Svitlana Flom, was caught on camera repeatedly calling the police on a black woman seemingly for minding her own damn business while sitting on a bench in a public space on the city’s Upper West Side. The black woman, whose Instagram handle is @_brownsugarbaby, recorded the incident and uploaded a series of short videos of Flom making multiple calls to the police and faking distress while telling vague stories about being attacked.
“From 6:15pm - 7:31pm this woman, Svitlana Flom, [and she] felt the need to not only approach me but call the cops MULTIPLE TIMES ON ME!!” the caption on the Instagram post reads. “She was too ‘Alarmed’ that I was sitting ‘comfortably’ in ‘her neighborhood!’ The first call was because she THOUGHT I was smoking in public...but by the 3rd call, it was bcuz I was ‘threatening her & her children !!’”
In the first video, Flom can be heard telling the police, “She’s playing the black card, she’s filming me.” In another video, the black woman points her camera to a nearby building and says to Flom, “that’s my building. This is my neighborhood. I have the right to be here.”
The woman said that on Flom’s third call to the police, she claimed she and her children are being threatened—even though most of the footage shows Flom is nowhere near her children.
According to Complex, the police eventually arrived but saw there was nothing pressing going on and declined to take any action. In one video, Flom can be heard asking the woman to come with her to meet the officers, to which the woman responds, “If Bozo was a person, it would be you.”
People on Twitter, of course, had a field day putting Karen 2.0 on full blast.
Some pointed out that Flom couldn’t possibly be worried about the wellbeing of her children since she keeps walking away from them to call the police on the black woman for menacingly...well...sitting in places.
Obviously, comparisons to Amy Cooper were made.
When will these white women learn the value of walking away and minding their own business? It would make their lives so much easier now that camera phones and social media have given black people a way to fight back.