A New Jersey woman has been charged with bias intimidation and harassment after she went on a racist rant targeted at her neighbor.
TMZ reports that the incident began when 60-year-old Claudia Emanuele was talking to a mail carrier about her mail arriving late. Her neighbor, Tameka Bordeaux approached them, and when Emanuele saw her, she immediately began hurling racial slurs at Bordeaux, including the n-word. Bordeaux tried to calm her neighbor down to no avail.
At one point, Bordeaux walked away and headed to the convenience store, but Emanuele kept following and shouting at her. Bordeaux captured the racist tirade on video, which she shared on Facebook and also gave to the Bayonne Police Department for investigation. The video shows a man intervening and asking the older woman, “Why do you keep following her?” He also instructed the woman to “Go that way.”
New Jersey Assemblywoman Angela McKnight caught wind of the video and called for an investigation into the matter. “This behavior is becoming so common now that we simply refer to these racist people as 'Karen' and let it go. I can’t just do that,” she said in a statement. “This matter needs to be investigated for sure but regardless of the outcome of the investigation, one thing for certain is that Tameka was incredibly wronged today.”
She continued, “To read the comments of some white people now making an excuse or defense for this behavior is alarming and gets us to the real problem of this systemic situation.”
The video helped the police identify and find the woman, who was taken into custody. According to WABC-TV, Emanuele moved to Bayonne from Tennessee in September 2020.
