It began with a COVID-era tussle over social distancing at a New Jersey shopping mall known for its high-end stores.
Ijeoma Ukenta had gone there to use a coupon for a free pair of Victoria’s Secret underwear. Another shopper, Abigail Elphick, got too close, Ukenta said, leading her to ask the woman to move 6 feet away.
Elphick complained to a cashier. Ukenta began recording the incident on her phone. The drama escalated quickly from there.
Elphick, who is white, lunged at Ukenta, who is Black, and then fell to the floor in tears, sobbing and begging that she stop recording her “mental breakdown.”
Ukenta summoned security officers; Elphick called the police. For 15 minutes, the recording continued.
To viewers of what quickly turned into a viral video, Elphick became known as the “Victoria’s Secret Karen,” a villain in a now-familiar genre of online fare.
But people watching online or at the store as the episode played out did not know that Elphick was disabled, with a long history of medical and psychological conditions, according to legal filings that shed new light on the encounter.
Such shaming videos have emerged in recent years as potent tools for exposing the casual and routine racism that Black people face in their daily lives. But two years after the Victoria’s Secret incident, the court documents, filed in recent weeks, show how they can also distort complicated interactions, reducing them to two-dimensional accounts.
Elphick, 27, lives in a complex reserved for residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her behavior stemmed not from a “race-based” problem, according to a complaint filed by her lawyers, but from fear that being filmed would lead to the loss of her apartment and job.
Ukenta, in her lawsuit, also described being motivated by fear — “keenly aware that if the police were called, she, a Black woman, may not be believed.”
At the time of the July 2021 encounter, Ukenta had an established online presence and a YouTube channel, where she offered vignettes about gardening, food, overseas travel and cultural events in Newark, New Jersey, where she lives.
She posted the Victoria’s Secret video in installments on several social media sites, and the brief encounter in the Mall at Short Hills in Millburn, one of the wealthiest communities in New Jersey, quickly tapped the internet’s rage.
Ukenta’s first video, “Karen Goes Crazy Part 1,” was viewed 2.6 million times on YouTube. An unrelated YouTube channel, Public Freakouts Unleashed, ranked it No. 1 in a compilation of the “Top 25 Most Notorious Karen Videos of ALL TIME.”
A GoFundMe campaign Ukenta created — “Help Me Defend Myself Against Karen” — generated donations of more than $104,000.
The incident was held up as an extreme example of the “Karen” meme: an encounter between a Black person and a white woman in which the white woman calls authorities, potentially endangering the Black person as a result.
“This how they be getting us killed, you see that?” Ukenta says on the video.
But the clash and its aftermath were even more complicated than they seemed.
In July, Ukenta filed a lawsuit against Elphick, Victoria’s Secret, the mall and its security company, which she argues were grossly negligent, slow to respond and treated her as the antagonist rather than a victim of a fellow shopper’s attempted assault. In the video, Ukenta can be heard asking why the security officers, who do not appear until a store employee goes to fetch them, are taking so long to arrive.
“They were extremely dismissive toward her,” Ukenta’s complaint states, “and were indifferent and nonchalant about her concerns for her safety.”
When police arrived, Elphick told an officer that her panic stemmed from fear that the video would be published and cause her to lose her job and her apartment, according to a police report.
As images of Elphick ricocheted around the world, an online commenter urged fellow viewers to contact a school district where Elphick had had an internship to demand that their “racist employee” be fired. She began getting harassing calls and as recently as April contacted police to report that a man who referred to the Victoria’s Secret video had called her and threatened to rape and kill her, court records show.
“I was horrified,” Tom Toronto, president of Bergen County’s United Way, which runs the residential complex where Elphick lives, said about the video’s aftermath and what he called a “total loss of perspective and proportion.”
“She has a disorder. She has anxiety,” he said. “She had a meltdown. Then the world we live in took over, and it became something entirely different than what it actually was.”
Elphick, through her lawyer, declined to comment.
Elphick’s counterclaim argues that her right to privacy was violated after Ukenta shared personal information about her. But the legal filing also highlights newer, unrelated videos Ukenta has published since the Short Hills mall incident that are critical of a landlord and several retail stores; the filings point to those videos as evidence that she has pursued a broader pattern of “harassment.”
“Ukenta has made a job out of preying on individuals from behind a keyboard,” the complaint states, “inciting hate while taking advantage of victims and the public at large for her own financial gain.”
It is an accusation that Ukenta’s lawyer, Tracey Hinson, strenuously rejects, and one that she said only underscored the wisdom of the impulse that led Ukenta to refuse to stop recording in the first place.
“She knew that in Millburn, New Jersey, she would not be believed,” Hinson said. “And that is exactly what has transpired.”
Ukenta has also continued to publish videos that do not depict conflict, including positive dining and shopping experiences.
Lawyers for the lingerie store and the security company did not reply to requests for comment. A lawyer for the mall declined to comment, citing the lawsuit.