Ben Crump told TMZ that if Miya Ponsetto had been black, she would have been behind bars. Ponsetto assaulted a black teen at a NYC hotel after she accused him of stealing her phone. She pleaded guilty last week to a hate crime charge, but will avoid jail time. Loading Something is loading.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump believes that if the woman caught on video assaulting a black teen in a NYC hotel in 2020 wasn’t white, she’d be behind bars.
“It is our belief that if Miya Ponsetto was an African American woman and she falsely assaulted and assaulted a young white teenager, she would have been charged and convicted of a felony,” Crump recently told TMZ in an interview.
Last week, Ponsetto, dubbed “Soho Karen,” avoided jail time by pleading guilty to unlawful imprisonment as a hate crime in connection with the incident where she falsely accused the teen of stealing her phone. As Insider’s Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert reported, she will be able to file another felony plea without an element of hate crime if she completes her probation on a separate drink-driving case.
The viral video, posted by the teen’s father, Keyon Harrold, shows Ponsetto assaulting the teen at the Arlo Hotel in New York. An Uber driver later gave her phone back.
After the incident, Harrold, a Grammy-winning jazz musician, was left behind his son “severely traumatized.” During the interview with TMZ, he said that Ponsetto has not apologized to his son.
“It’s traumatic to even think about it,” he told the outlet. “It’s a trauma every time it comes up. It’s a trauma to revisit this topic so many times and trigger my whole family. I still don’t understand – even if I spoke to her at the time – what was going through her head, which validated her, which even made it possible to attack a child in such a way.”
This post Crumps Says If SoHo Karen Were Black She Would Be ‘Convicted’
was original published at “https://www.insider.com/crumps-says-if-soho-karen-black-she-would-be-convicted-2022-4”
