New York woman who pepper-sprayed Muslim Uber driver indicted for hate crime
New York woman who pepper-sprayed Muslim Uber driver indicted for hate crime
Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, shown on video assaulting Shohel Mahmud after he began reciting prayer in Arabic
Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, shown on video assaulting Shohel Mahmud after he began reciting prayer in Arabic
A New York woman who pepper-sprayed a Muslim Uber driver while he was praying has been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on hate crime charges.
Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, is shown in a surveillance video repeatedly pepper-spraying her Uber driver, Shohel Mahmud. The assault took place in August on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near the corner of east 65th Street and Lexington Avenue, shortly after Mahmud began reciting a prayer in Arabic.
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Guilbeault’s former employer, the public relations and marketing firm D Pagan Communications, wrote on X it is aware of her actions and “don’t condone this behavior”.
How do you live in New York City, and still be this overtly racist?
There's plenty of racist people in NYC just like there is anywhere.
Because it takes multiple generations to get rid of racism, and her lineage hasn't caught up.
I'm glad she's been indicted for a hate crime, but will Uber compensate the driver in any way? Of course not. He's not an employee!
And if you click through to the surveillance video article, you see this:
Mahmud acknowledged the ordeal has hurt him financially, as he is the breadwinner of his family who currently lives in Bangladesh.
Good decision.
Why is it called "hate" crime
Because it is an attack on somebody for belonging to a group rather than something about themselves specifically.
https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hate-crimes#hatecrime
Hate crimes, by definition, are not an attack only against an individual, but cause deliberate harm to an entire community.
The crime is different, so they're treated differently, of course. We also have different degrees of murder depending on the person's motivation.
It’s treated differently because it is a different predictor of violence. I’m not a violent person (but, like most people, I could be brought to assault a person under the right circumstances), so as long as someone’s not terrorizing me or someone else, I probably won’t get violent. That’s not a big risk, but if all it took for me to get violent was someone exercising a different religion in front of me, I’d be a much bigger societal risk.
Yayyyy.
🤔 about the second part.
She was obviously just protecting herself from a terrorist. /s
Did he just randomly start chanting and she freaked out? Why didn't the just start praying during a fare?
Praying is not chanting. Somehow I doubt a Catholic saying a hail Mary would have ellicited the same response. It appears the DA agrees.
As to what happened, he was driving the car with the two passengers in the back seat. The driver and passengers were not talking to each other, or otherwise interacting. Video linked in the article shows her suddenly lunging towards him and spraying him in the face with pepper spray at point blank range.
Her friend tries to pull her off of him. He then tries to get out of the car, while she keeps spraying him, where he calls 911 and she's arrested.
Wait... your description doesn't include any praying either. Did he pray or not? It just looks like an attack.
It would make me uncomfortable if someone just started audibly praying while driving me though. Given the tone I might even take it as a threat on my life, if I felt like it was some "last rights" or "give me strength" shit that made me feel like they were about to off themselves with me in the car.
The solution would absolutely not be to pepper spray the driver though. That can only make my fears a reality.