Influencer Who Tested Positive for COVID-19 and Fled to the Hamptons May Have Received a $350K PPP Loan

By Maria Sherman | July 29, 2020 | 2:44pm

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Influencer Who Tested Positive for COVID-19 and Fled to the Hamptons May Have Received a $350K PPP Loan

Image:Dimitrios Kambouris (Getty Images)

Remember, if you can, mid-March 2020. While much of the world had preemptively shut down to protect its citizens from the covid-19 pandemic, the United States lingered, slowly closing businesses as the number of confirmed cases surged past 100,000. Tensions were particularly high in New York, which saw the brunt of early cases and had a limited number of tests.

Around this time, NYC-based fashion influencer Arielle Charnas (known as Something Navy online) posted on her Instagram Story that she had a sore throat and fever, and her doctor instructed her to “quarantine herself,” as The New York Post reported. Instead, she tagged her pal, Dr. Jake Deutsch of the Cure Urgent Care facility on the Upper West Side, using her connections to get a test when most Americans exhibiting serious symptoms could not. She tested positive, told her audience she was going to quarantine herself after all and instead fled to the Hamptons, enraging everyone in her wake.

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Now there’s another infuriating new detail to her coronavirus adventure: apparently, Charnas received “a loan of up to $350,000 for her fashion line Something Navy,” Page Six reports, allegedly to retain 25 employees. Charnas was reportedly given “a loan of $150,000 to $350,000 through JPMorgan Chase on April 13,” ten days after the U.S. government launched the Paycheck Protection Program, which sought to help small businesses keep employees on their payroll. Apparently the loan was made out to “Something Navy,” and registered to Charnas’ Manhattan home address. According to Page Six, Charnas is worth $2.5 million.

A representative for Something Navy provided Page Six the following statement:

“Like many companies, the pandemic had a significant impact on our business, and we participated in the PPP to help protect the jobs of our employees. All of the money was used towards our payroll to avoid job or schedule reductions during the worst of the economic downturn caused by COVID-19—what it was intended to do.

We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration of all our financial options, we believed that we had a responsibility to our staff to apply for this program to help us manage the financial realities of the current environment.”

She couldn’t possibly have gotten money from elsewhere, right? It’s not like other small businesses could’ve benefitted from such a generous loan or anything…