The saga of Miya Ponsetto, popularly known as Soho Karen, continues—though I have to say, this chick is pretty exhausting.
Interview maven Gayle King found out exactly how exhausting when she spoke to Ponsetto for CBS This Morning, hours before the 22-year-old was nabbed by police for her attack on 14-year-old Keyon Harrold Jr. (more on that later).
As you’ll remember, Ponsetto baselessly accused the Black teen of stealing her phone and then instigated a deranged apparent assault on him that was partly captured by the teen’s father—jazz musician Keyon Harrold Sr.—on video and posted to social media. Surveillance video shared by the NYPD after the initial video went viral shows that Ponsetto literally tackled the child. Following all that, her phone was discovered in an Uber and returned to her, after which she ran back home to California, probably confident that she would escape consequences for her actions.
The NYPD then put out a fugitive warrant for her arrest, yet Ponsetto and her attorney decided to sit for the television interview on Thursday—which did her no favors.
Showing herself to be a liar (and a pretty bad one) Ponsetto is initially seen telling King that she accused the Black teen of having her phone because she had been checking everyone exiting the Arlo Hotel in Soho that day to see if they had stolen it.
“I consider myself to be super sweet,” says Ponsetto. “I really never meant to hurt him or his father.”
King cuts through that crap and asks Ponsetto if she had really stopped all the other people leaving the hotel and blamed them for stealing her janky iPhone (my words, not Gayle’s).
“Um, no, not everyone, just the people—” Ponsetto haltingly admits.
When King pushes back on the woman’s specious claim that she is “super sweet,” Ponsetto pulls out the Karen big guns in an attempt to gain sympathy.
“How would you feel if you were alone in New York and you’re going to spend time with your family during the holidays and you lose the one thing that gets stolen from you?”
How do you think the 14-year-old you jumped felt, sis?
“I don’t feel that is who I am as a person,” she continues, as is typical for people who’ve gone viral for exhibiting racist behavior. “But I do sincerely from the bottom of my heart apologize if I made the son feel like I assaulted him.”
Feel like she assaulted him? We saw you go after him on video! It’s gaslighting 101, but she doesn’t stop there.
“Basically, I’m a 22-year-old girl. How is one girl accusing a guy about a phone, a crime?”
As soon as King reacts incredulously to the suggestion that the adult Ponsetto is somehow a victim and an innocent girl compared to the literal child she physically went after—the claws come back out.
I won’t spoil it for you, you can watch the conclusion in the full video below:
Luckily, there’s some good news: Ponsetto is finally facing some real consequences. She is now behind bars in California after officers from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and the NYPD tracked her down, officials said in a statement.
Belying her ridiculous claim that she is a “sweet person,” police said Ponsetto wouldn’t stop when they tried to pull her car over near her home on Thursday afternoon and then refused to get out when they finally caught up to her. She slammed the car door on one of the cops, according to a report from the New York Post, until the police finally had to forcibly remove her from her vehicle. Ponsetto is currently being held in custody without bail for the fugitive warrant, where she will remain pending a hearing for extradition to New York.
Her lawyer, Sharen Ghatan, told the AP that Ponsetto is “emotionally unwell”—which to me feels like yet another predictable play in the Karen handbook. What DSM-V diagnosis causes someone to target Black people and their children for violence? All she had to do was leave them alone. Now she’s in jail and is the latest face of people who choose to racially profile rather than act decently.