Another day, another racist. Today’s vile viral video comes from Flatbush, Brooklyn, where a woman dubbed “Cornerstore Caroline” has been named and shamed for calling 911 after she claimed she was sexually assaulted by a little boy with a big blue backpack. That’s right: An elementary schooler was accosted by a white woman for #WearingABackpackWhileBlack.
The video, originally posted to Facebook on Wednesday, begins in front of a bodega, where two children are bawling and crying for their mommy while the woman, now identified as Teresa Sue Klein, 53, demands immediate police attention. “I want the cops here right now,” she barks at the 911 operator, as white folks who do this crap often do. “I was just sexually assaulted by a child.”
A crowd quickly gathers, and voices can be heard calling her a “pedophile,” and telling her to “go away.”
Klein is aggressive throughout the entire video clip, telling the man recording the video, Jason Littlejohn, to “upload that to Worldstar,” referencing Worldstar HipHop, a well-known viral video site. When an unnamed young white woman attempts to flex her privilege and call her out, Klein gets in her face, dismissing her as being “young enough to be her daughter,” as though age will teach the whippersnapper that racism is where it’s at, apparently. An unnamed black man separates them.
Who DOES this?
It’s baffling, honestly. Watch the footage below, edited by Heavy to remove the very large amount of personal details Klein screams at the 911 dispatcher.
NYPD did indeed arrive at the scene 17 minutes later, but no report was filed because everyone, including Klein, had left.
The original Facebook video quickly went viral; as of this writing, it has over 4.2 million views.
Local journalist Andrew Ramos, of PIX11, got the bodega’s security footage of the incident, and uploaded it to Twitter on Thursday morning. While there does appear to be some confusion about whether or not Klein was calling herself a cop, or claiming that the mother of the nine-year-old—who absolutely did not sexually assault her—said that she was a police officer, it turns out Klein’s knee-jerk assumption—that the sobbing nine-year-old was a budding sexual predator—was way, way off.
But we all expected that, didn’t we?
Watch it for yourself, with Ramos narrating.
Ramos—who also adds that the bodega owner described Klein as “unwell”—and another journalist visited Klein at her home Friday, and, true to character, she called the cops on them, too.
Heavy did some digging into Klein’s life before she was immortalized forever as “Cornerstore Caroline,” and it turns out that the angry accuser is pretty boring when she isn’t screaming at black children.
Klein is a Missouri native who went to the University of Missouri to study sociology. She has also been a performer and actress. Klein returned to the University of Missouri around 2008 to complete her Ph.D in biochemistry.
Like Oakland’s BBQ Becky, Jennifer Schulte, Klein also holds a doctorate, proving that even a ton of education can’t save people of color from racism.
Predictably, there’s no indication that Klein will be charged for abusing emergency resources or harassing an innocent family, but it’s worth noting that one Brooklyn politician, State Senator Jesse Hamilton, is working to make these widespread abuses of the 911 system illegal.
Hamilton, who represents Brownsville, Crown Heights and Flatbush, proposed new legislation a week after a self-described Trump fan called police to report him for speaking to constituents in public. It would criminalize 911 calls against people of color without evidence of malice.
"That's gonna be a hate crime," Hamilton said. "This pattern of calling the police on black people going about their business and participating in the life of our country has to stop."
Hamilton’s proposed legislation should be the law everywhere. After all, the consequences of going viral are fleeting—there’s always some new racist around the corner to grab the spotlight. Convictions, however, last forever.
No word from the family of three who Klein attacked. Here’s hoping the little ones aren’t too traumatized, wherever they are.
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