Cheektowaga Mom's Racist Rant

Overview

Cheektowaga Mom's Racist Rant refers to a YouTube video of an enraged woman yelling racial slurs at a man in the parking lot outside of a dollar store after he allegedly scared her children by starting his car.

Background

On June 3rd, 2014, Narvell Benning, a 36-year-old resident of Cheektowaga, New York who goes by the handle IAMOYAB^[1] on YouTube, uploaded a video clip of a woman screaming racial slurs and other obscenities at him for scaring her children in the parking lot outside of a local dollar store.

In the video, the woman tells the man that her husband is on his way to confront him, and upon realizing that the conversation is being recorded on camera, she taunts that the video wouldn't get her in any legal trouble, quoted as saying:

“He knows the cops? How many cops have I stripped for?”

The same day the video was uploaded, Redditor crunchy_noodles submitted the video to the /r/videos^[2] subreddit, where comments were disabled shortly after Redditors began posting the woman's personally identifiable information, but not before they identified her as Janelle Ambrosia and uncovered her Facebook account. In less than 48 hours, the video gained over 4.2 million views.

Notable Developments

In the following days, the video was highlighted by several news sites including The Daily Mail,^[7] The Daily Dot^[8] and The Huffington Post.^[9] On June 4th, a Facebook page^[13] titled “Janelle Ambrosia is racist” was created, gaining over 14,000 likes in less than 48 hours.

Radio Interview with the Woman

On June 4th, Buffalo, New York radio station WBLK^[3] uploaded a video to their YouTube channel^[4] featuring a phone interview they had conducted with the women from the video, who identified herself as Janelle Ambrosia. The interview was arranged after she contacted the station with a desire to share "her side of the story." During the interview Ambrosia alleges the man videotaping the incident had almost hit her son with his car and had called her a "Crackheaded cracker." She went on to say that her ex was trying to use the video as means to gain custody of their children, and insisted several times that she is not a racist.

In less than 48 hours the video gained over 500,000 views, and was been featured on several websites including Gawker^[5] and Mediate.^[6]

Radio Interview with the Driver

On the next day, the station uploaded a video of an on air interview with the man behind the camera, Narvell Benning, which had aired the previous night during a show called Brian’s World. During the interview Benning refutes Ambrosia’s claims he had called her names, and claimed he had only scared her children by starting his car, but did not nearly hit them. He also expressed disappointment that her children had witnessed her tirade.

Fake Twitter Account

On June 4th, 2014, several websites reported Amborsia was continuing her racist tirade through her Twitter account^[10], including Jezebel^[11] and Heavy.^[12] However the same day at 6:47 PM EST the account sent out a tweet confirming it was a parody account not run by Ambrosia.

External References