A Starbucks customer in Florida went viral for unleashing a hate-filled and homophobic tirade on a lesbian couple whom she accused of grooming children.
The shocking TikTok clip has now had more than 7 million views after it was posted by user Cassie Urry on Sunday.
Ms Urry told The Daily Beast that she and her girlfriend Lorrin Skrbec stopped for a coffee in Coral Gables before getting on a cruise from Miami to the Bahamas.
She said that when she entered the store customers and staff were all staring at the woman.
“We saw [a] woman saying, like, a lot of racist things and a lot of racial slurs,” 22-year-old Ms Urry said.
“There (were) Asian customers there. And she had said to them that they were creations of the devil and that everybody in the Starbucks was sitting in the presence of the devil and not doing anything about it.”
She said that the woman, who has not been identified, was making a string of anti-Asian statements linked to Covid-19, and that her girlfriend intervened while she recorded the incident.
In the video, which is entitled “Karen in the wild”, the woman asks the couple, “Is lesbianism okay?”
And then answers her own question, stating “No, it isn’t because you touch children. You rape children. Yes, because you’re evil.”
Customers and staff defended the couple from the wild allegations, but the woman ended her rant by saying “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
The video ends with the store manager confronting the woman and taking her to one side.
“We were both in shock a little bit. It was weird,” Ms Urry told The Daily Beast. “I didn’t quite know how to respond. I was feeling angry and feeling a lot of emotions, but I think just I knew realistically that escalating the situation wasn’t going to get us anywhere. And you just can’t reason with some people. So we just had to keep our cool.”
A Starbucks spokesperson said the company does not “tolerate any form of discrimination” in its stores.
