A Caucasian New York City nurse/physician’s assistant,
Sarah Comrie, found herself dubbed “
Citi Bike Karen,” after a young black man alleged that she had tried to take one of the big-city rental bikes from him during a brief street scuffle. From what I can piece together of the teenager’s story, he claimed that he had paid for the bike and that an angry and exhausted Comrie — who was six months pregnant and had just completed a twelve-hour shift — attempted to jack it from him and a group of several of his friends.
This claim appears to have been simply believed verbatim, at face value. Following the release of a cellphone video depicting a heated confrontation between her and the group of teens — which included the use of epithets like “retarded” for Comrie, contact with her distended stomach, and her screaming for help — the PA was temporarily put on leave from her job at Bellevue Hospital, and pilloried in the press.
There’s a lot here. First and unsurprisingly, the initial narrative turned out to be complete BS. Within days of the conflict, Comrie and the lawyer she was forced to hire provided the
New York Post and other Big Apple outlets with formal receipts showing, as the
Post paraphrased, that “she was the one who purchased the [bicycle] at the center of the viral incident . . . [and] rented the bike first.” Possibly, the group of young men attempted to steal the thing from
her, before passersby intervened, and the machine was locked back up. Or, as Bike Bro No. 1’s
sister has passionately argued, there may simply have been a good-faith dispute here: A young rider who had just used one particular Citi Bike wanted to call “dibs” on it so that he could enjoy 45 more minutes of ride-time at a reduced rate. Arguments, I suspect, have broken out over far less than that in New York City — a town where a cab driver once screamed “Chicago sucks!!!” at me and dropped me off early after I told him where I was from. (He wouldn’t have dared try pulling that in the Windy City.) In any case, if this even needs to be said, one pregnant lady did not strong-arm five young men.
Only a truly broken society would look at a weeping pregnant woman arguing with five laughing men and think: ‘Why is she attacking them?’
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