The borough president is urging locals to join him for a conversation about diversity on Monday outside the Ditmas Park deli where a passerby recorded a white woman reporting a black child for allegedly “grabbing her a–” last week.
The woman, who accused the child of sexual assault in a video shared on Facebook last Wednesday by user Jason Stovetop Littlejohn, returned to the Albermarle Road bodega on Friday afternoon to watch its surveillance footage of the incident, which clearly showed the child’s backpack — not his hands — brush up against her backside, leading her to immediately apologize to the boy for what she called a mistake, according to a second clip Littlejohn shared.
“Young man, I don’t know your name, but I’m sorry,” she said.
But her mea culpa didn’t stop a crowd of angry residents who also crammed into the store to watch the footage from denouncing the woman — whom netizens christened “Cornerstore Caroline” after the first clip went viral — as a “liar” and “white trash,” Littlejohn’s second video shows.
And Borough President Adams will use the incident as a springboard to stress the need for harmony among the area’s diverse population, as well as the impact of threatening public behavior, during his 5:30 pm discussion, he said.
“Our community is rightfully outraged by this,” Adams said. “It has brought shame to our borough.”
Littlejohn’s first clip generated more than 7.4-million views since it was shared last week, and shows the seemingly elementary-school-aged boy and his younger sister in tears while standing with their mother outside the bodega near Flatbush Avenue as the woman phoned in her complaint.
“I was just sexually assaulted by a child,” the woman shouted into the phone to what she said was a 911 operator.
A crowd of passersby quickly rallied to the family’s defense, lambasting the woman and her allegedly goosed derrière.
“Who would want to touch that flat a–,” said one woman. “Go home!”
And as the video went viral, outraged viewers posted more than 34,000 overwhelmingly critical comments about the woman — who unwittingly shared her phone number and home address with the world while being recorded, according to one attentive commenter.
“She said her address out loud and to the world,” the Facebook user wrote. “Now she’s going to get threats.”
But a Police Department spokeswoman on Friday morning told this newspaper that authorities had no record of any sexual-assault complaints filed at that location in the past month.
A message left on the number the woman shouted into the phone was not returned by press time.
The woman reported the child two months after Crown Heights state Sen. Jesse Hamilton claimed a supporter of President Trump called the cops on him for “campaigning while black,” and subsequently announced he planned to introduce legislation to crack down on discriminatory 911 calls.
And she joins a contingent of controversial callers whose 911 reports against black individuals stoked online outrage, including “Doorway Debbie,” who called police on a black woman for taking shelter in the doorway of her Park Slope building during a rainstorm; “BBQ Becky,” who called police on picnickers in Oakland, Calif.; and “Permit Patty,” who reported an 8-year-old-girl to the San Francisco police for selling water on a sidewalk near a stadium.
