Amy Cooper tells her side of the story

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Cooper still believes that she had no choice but to call the cops on birder Christian Cooper, whom she claimed threatened her and her dog when she didn’t comply with his request to put the animal on a leash in Central Park.

“I don’t know that as a woman alone in a park that I had another option,” Amy said on the podcast “Honestly with Bari Weiss” that came out Tuesday.

She claimed that she was about to put the leash on when Christian apparently told her that if she didn’t comply, he’d do something that she was “not going to like.”

“I’m trying to figure out, you know, what does that mean? Is that a physical attack on me? Is that to my dog? Like, what is he about to do?” she said.

She said Christian, who was holding a bike helmet in one of his hands, pulled out dog treats and called the pooch over to him.

I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, is this guy like going to like lure my dog over and try to like hit him with this bike helmet?'” she recalled.

At some point, she realized that Christian had begun filming her.

“It’s really weird because he’s still standing there, you know, same very physical posture, and suddenly out of him comes this voice from man who’s been very dominant towards me,” she said.

“Suddenly, you know, almost this victimized voicing [sic], [saying,] ‘Don’t come near me. Don’t come any closer,” she said. “Like, almost like he’s terrified of me … To me that’s even more terrifying now because you’ve gone from screaming at me — if you kept screaming at me, at least it was consistent, but now his whole verbal demeanor has changed.”

The dog owner said she asked Christian to stop recording her and when he didn’t listen, she decided to call 911.

I’d explored all my options. I tried to leave. I tried to look for anyone who’s around,” she recalled. “There was no noise, no sound. And it was, you know, it was my last attempt to sort of hope that he would step down and leave me alone.”

She said that the encounter and the ensuing backlash forced her to flee her home and has left her traumatized about taking her dog outside.

Christian could not be immediately reached for comment on Tuesday.

Asked what she would want to say to him, Amy said that she’s thought about it “a lot.”

“I have zillion questions of course in my head or things I’d like to say, but the one that really, I really would just like to start and open this conversation with is, ‘You scared me,'” she said.

It sounds like she thinks he had three hands. Dog treat, bike helmet, phone to record her, something don't add up unless he can juggle.

There is an anti-Karen serum.
And Karen’s are mad about it.
https://mobile.twitter.com/eiyawow/stat ... 42?lang=en

I prefer Lysol.It’s cleans and disinfects.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailyd ... ren/%3famp

“I will spray you like an insect and then stomp your ass in this building,” she tells the anti-masker. “Don’t get it twisted ’cause I’m old. … s**t, I will f**k you up in here. Don’t go there.”

To tell this story is to address a different set of problems.

Among them: our collective intoxication with public shaming. Our willingness to dispense with due process when we think we “know” the truth in the absence of evidence. The media’s complicity in perpetuating public judgments, even when the facts directly contradict those judgments. The lack of proportion in the punishments meted out to perceived offenders. The absence of any avenue for redemption or reconciliation when a breach has been made. And the mercilessness shown to those at the center of these storms, often leaving them suicidal and broken. (Thankfully, Christian Cooper tried to rein in some excesses of the public reaction: “I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.” And I hope it’s clear that attacking him isn’t part of our purpose here.)

Another question arose as I tried to untangle the facts from the narrative: If the roles of Amy and Christian had been reversed — if she had been a birdwatcher who accosted a dog-walker for running his dog off-leash, if she had confronted him for breaking the park rules, if she had tried to lure his dog away from him with “dog treats I carry for just such intransigence” — wouldn’t she still be the Karen? In other words: was it her behavior or her identity that had done her in?

It sounds like she thinks he had three hands. Dog treat, bike helmet, phone to record her, something don't add up unless he can juggle.

For starters, there was the Facebook post that Christian shared when he uploaded the original video, which his sister posted on Twitter in the hours after the encounter. In the post, Christian recorded his contemporaneous account of what happened in the moments before the camera started rolling. “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it,” Christian recounted himself saying to Amy. He also shared that he’d pulled out “the dog treats I carry for just for [sic] such intransigence.”

The simple and likely reality is that she would not have read the situation the same if he had not been black. Her fears were not reasonable. I know all about the "being a woman alone" part, and I get that caution is needed, but I don't believe for one minute that race didn't play a big part.

inb4 Cyberdad, Brictoria and TheRobotLives hijack this thread into a 50 page debate where no one wins because debates on WP have the same people arguing the same positions without changing sides

It sounds like she thinks he had three hands. Dog treat, bike helmet, phone to record her, something don't add up unless he can juggle.

It was also quite interesting to read what Bari Weiss wrote about the interview:

So, you are saying that any man who wasn't black wouldn't have instilled fear into her by the same threatening stance.
I haven't heard such logical nonsense in quite some time.
Kudos.

I'm saying it is less likely. Although ... a big brawny guy covered in tattoos and scowling would probably have scared me. We all instinctively make unfair assumptions. The problem is not in having them. The problem is what we do with them.

Brictoria's comments, however, do soften my assumptions. If the woman was a previous assault victim, that is likely to have played a much larger role than race. Regardless, she handled the situation wrong. She let her assumptions, whatever they were, keep her from listening to and understanding what the man was saying and trying to do.