'Keep recording, sissy': Woman unleashes homophobic tirade at man in nail salon
A man’s relaxing spa day at a Seattle nail salon was derailed after a woman getting a pedicure next to him hurled homophobic slurs at him after he asked her to take her phone call off speakerphone.
Christopher Brown said he had been keeping the Dec. 30 incident to himself, but decided Thursday to post on Facebook details of the verbal attack, which he recorded, because, as he wrote, “What kind of social justice warrior would I be staying quiet?”
Brown explained that he was frequenting his “favorite foot spa,” Casabella Spa & Nails in Lynnwood, Wash., when a woman having a loud FaceTime conversation entered and made a beeline for the nail polish wall. “She proceeds to pick out her color,” Brown explained, before “berating another staff member for the selection not being what she wanted.”
Then she took a seat beside Brown and prepared for her pedicure, while still on her phone. That’s when Brown decided to speak up, asking the woman, if she would “kindly mind taking your phone off speaker in the spa,” while “pointing to the signs asking patrons to keep their noise down.”
According to Brown, things turned ugly from there. He said the woman told her daughter, “Hold on, I need to take care of this f*****.” From there, Brown started recording the incident — “I knew this had a potential to make a difference,” he later told local Seattle news station KOMO — just as the woman began threatening to call the police on him.
“Here: Let’s call 911, and let’s just get it over with,” the blonde patron, who was not identified, said to Brown. “Because you’re harassing me for no reason, telling me not to be on the phone.”
For almost two minutes, Brown continues to record, without comment. “Here, I’m recording you, too. How d’you like it? Keep recording. Go ahead, keep recording,” she says, before taking her complaint to a Casabella employee. “Is it nice because he bothers your customer that I’ve been coming here for so long?” she asks a salon worker offscreen, who replies, “I don’t know about that — sorry.”
After the employee distanced himself from the argument, the woman presented an ultimatum to the salon staff. “Well, it’s either he goes, or I go,” she said. “So which is it?”
When the worker declines to get involved, the woman gets up and prepares to walk out — but not before berating Brown. “Keep recording, sissy. Keep recording, because you probably wish you had a c*** like me, right?” the woman says to Brown. “I should show you my parts,” she said.
“F*****! Sissy! Queer! F**!,” she called out. “Eat my p****. Eat it! How’s that, f**? Queer. Queer ’cause you want a p****?” She then walked out the door.
“I was in complete disbelief and shock,” Brown later told KOMO News. He said deciding to share the attack publicly took “about a week of not sleeping, a week of anxiety, a week of worrying what would happen if I didn’t act.” His post has been shared more than 2,000 times and has received dozens of comments from sympathizers and well-wishers.
“I am so proud of your composure through the entire experience. I’m so sorry that people like this still exist in the world,” one person wrote. Another commented, “Wow. The audacity of some people. I’m sorry you had to experience this.” But Brown insists he’s “thicker-skinned” than most, writing, “I just feel for the people she’s encountered in her life that aren’t that strong.”
However, he told KOMO that the sticks-and-stones adage does hold true in instances like this. “I know this was just words, but they really do matter,” he said, telling the station that one of the reasons he moved to Seattle is because he’s gay, and the city has a reputation for being inclusive.
“Hate is hiding in the hearts of some people,” Brown said, “and we have to change it.” He adds that it was never his intention to harm the woman who verbally berated him, however. “I wouldn’t want to cause any undue harm on her life,” he said. “I would just want her to come to light with what she said, realize that those views are not OK and that you can’t treat people like that.”
He said he did intend for the post to go viral, though, to put a stop to incidents like this. “Please take a minute to view and share this,” he urged in his Facebook post. “And know that even in the Seattle region, life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows for the lgbt community.”
Yahoo Lifestyle reached out to Casabella Spa & Nails, but the staffer who answered the phone refused to comment. An employee confirmed to KOMO that “Brown was polite the entire time.”
Yahoo Lifestyle was not able to identify the woman in the video.
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