A plus-sized influencer on TikTok shared a video of an encounter she had at the gym with a woman who laughed at her.
The comments section of the video is full of people showing support for the influencer and calling on her to expose the identity of the woman. While she did end up showing the woman’s face, it didn’t go as planned.
The video starts off with Bethy Red, the influencer, filming herself fixing her hair in the mirror in workout gear. Red placed a big white box over the the woman to censor her. She’s heard coming into the studio place and seemingly unprompted asks, “Girl, what are you doing? Are you taking videos of yourself?” in a condescending tone.
Confused, Red replies, “Yeah?” The woman asks her why, and Red tells her that she is recording a video for her blog. The woman responds by laughing at her. Red simply continues to fix her hair so that she can continue her workout, confused as to what just happened. The woman later says to Red, “Well, have fun.”
Red says “Thanks,” prompting the woman to laugh once more.
Viewers slammed the woman in the comments section of the video and lauded Red’s grace.
“She goes to the gym because she hates herself,” one commenter wrote. “You go because you love yourself. That’s the only difference that matters.”
Another person commented, “You just KNOW she was a ‘mean girl’ in high school and never grew out of that mean girl phase nor developed a personality.”
“This is misogynistic microaggression and she knew exactly what she was doing,” a third said. “Her intent was to make sure she left you feeling insecure.”
The video currently has over 4.8 million views on TikTok and over 783,000 likes. The top comment, which has been liked over 198,000 times, said, “Please take the big white square off. EXPOSE HER. This behavior is atrocious and we can’t protect people like that.”
Red seemingly did reveal the woman’s identity but later took down that video and posted another early Friday morning explaining why. She says she received direct messages from two women who claimed they received death threats because Red’s followers thought the rude woman was one of them.
“I didn’t reveal [the identity] to make justice for myself,” she says in the video. “I didn’t know TikTok was this intense, and when people said ‘pull up’ and ‘beat her up,’ I thought people were joking.” She says the point of the video was “that if somebody is mean to you, for whatever reason, show empathy and show kindness.”
She urges her followers to stop looking for the person and wrote in the caption of the video, “A lot of innocent people are getting death threats and hate messages for nothing!”
The Daily Dot reached out to Red.
