This isn’t necessarily something you should try at home, but it is viscerally satisfying: a Boston woman chased down a man she says was filming her “crotch and backside,” as well as the private areas of other women and girls. She followed him down the street with her own cellphone aloft, yelling, “Oh, does this make you uncomfortable?”
The video shot by Jase Dillan, an aspiring singer from Boston, is quickly going viral, with nearly a million views in less than a day. On Facebook, Dillan wrote that she was running errands on Newbury Street late Thursday afternoon when she witnessed the man filming her and other women, including ones who were “clearly” underage:
Just another day on Newbury St. please help me find and identify this creep. not only did he film my crotch and backside, along with the same of at least 8 other women that i personally witnessed in less than 10 minutes, but I decided to confront him after watching him do the same to 2 girls who could not have been more than 14 years old. DISGUSTING.
Dillan told Cosmopolitan’s Rebecca Rose that she called the police after she noticed what was going on, but decided she wasn’t comfortable letting him walk away. She pursued him for several blocks, demanding that he delete the footage of her and telling him she wasn’t appreciative of his amateur filmmaking efforts:
The man progresses from apparent confusion—“Get the fuck out of here. I don’t know what you’re talking about”— to anger, and what sure sounds like an admission that he was filming: “Why do you think I would need your permission, first of all? Assuming that — I’m not a lawyer.”
“Well, you should have one,” Dillan says, “if you’re going to be a creep and film girls on Newbury Street.” And then, as she takes notice of the man’s appearance: “Look at that, a wedding ring. I can’t wait to film this and put it on the internet.”
Filming people in public is gross and intrusive, but it’s also broadly legal, because one doesn’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy in public.” In some states it is illegal to film someone’s “intimate parts” without their consent, but that likely would not apply to filming fully clothed people in public. That’s essentially what the police told Dillan when they arrived, she told Cosmo.
Interestingly, when Fox Boston ran this story, they chose to blur out the man’s face, “as no charges have been filed against him.” You don’t have to do that, Fox. He doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy either. That’s how this works. Sir.
Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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Screengrab via Facebook/Jase Dillan