Over the last week, dozens of women have come forward on social media with claims of being punched in the face while walking down the streets of New York City. On March 27, Bethenny Frankel weighed in, saying that she, too, had been assaulted while minding her business on the street.
In a TikTok comment posted on another victim’s video, Frankel wrote, “This is insane bc this happened to me a few months ago but I was embarrassed to say. I was on the [Upper West Side]. Insane. I was taking video of a bakery.” After her story made headlines, she elaborated in a follow-up video posted to TikTok on March 28, which featured the text “I was punched in the face.”
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“So many of you have wanted to punch me in the face at one point or another, and someone else did do it for you,” she begins. “I saw a woman talking about the fact that she had been punched in the face on the street, and I commented, ‘oh my god, the same thing happened to me.’ I actually recorded my reaction to it that day, but felt embarrassed or weird to post it.”
She then went on to give a play-by-play of the encounter. “I was in New York City looking for an apartment, and I stopped at this cute little deli-bakery tiny place,” Frankel says. As she was exiting the hole-in-the-wall shop, she adds, she was hit in the face.
“[He] hit me,” she clarified, “it wasn’t like a closed fist…I was completely stunned and I walked outside [to] my driver, who’s also security. I looked at him and gestured over to this man, this homeless man, to explain to him that I had just been hit, but I didn’t want to provoke this guy even more,” she continues. When her driver began to confront the attacker, Bethenny Frankel says she told him she’d rather just “get the hell out of here.”
“At that point, I texted the broker and said ‘I don’t wanna see apartments anymore. This city’s insane.’ Because I attributed this to crime that was happening during the pandemic. Little did I know that this would become this trend of people getting hit. And even when I commented in that post, I didn’t know that it had been multiple people. I just saw one person say it,” she says.
She also claims that she did not delete the comment, and, according to her team, the comment is still there.
“I’m sorry to all the other women that it’s happening to,” she goes on. “It’s wild.”
Multiple men have been arrested in connection to separate punching incidents as of press time.
Read the full article here
