I couldn’t sleep after watching the Amy Cooper video last night. I found Christian Cooper's calmness remarkable, and was so glad he had the instinct to record. It brought back memories of one of the craziest things that has ever happened to me. [THREAD]

When I first moved to SF, I shared a house in Nob Hill with two housemates. Around 9 months in to my stay, we had a new housemate move in. She worked in tech, seemed normal, we had several FB friends in common - good sign, right?

A day after she moved in, she left mid-unpacking to go to a party. I was recovering from a minor medical procedure and spent the day locked up in my room, reading, napping, listening to music. I emerged around 8 PM from my room, to find my laptops, credit cards missing.

Someone had broken into our house while I was inside! I immediately called 911, alerted the landlord, my two housemates and my workplace; I called and froze all my cards. The cops arrived shortly after, quickly took inventory of what had been stolen, wrote a report & left.

Around 12 AM, the new housemate returned, knocked on my door, weeping. She said her bags, jewelry etc were missing. She was furious that the cops had not checked her room. I tried to tell her that it all happened quickly and neither the cops nor I would know what she’d lost.

At this point she was inconsolable; she called 911 and was yelled expletives at the operator, demanding that they send over a cop right away. It was past midnight. I understood she was upset but whole thing was hysterical.

This was the relatively pleasant part of the story.

In the next five mins, the doorbell rang and I heard a woman talking to my housemate. Before I knew it, the woman was in my living room, agitated, fulminating and shouting at me for “stealing my sister’s” Chanel bags the moment she stepped out of the house.

I was alone, sick and a stranger was accusing me of stealing bags! In the house I’d lived in for nearly a year! This situation was so absurd, how would anyone believe me? Self-preservation instincts kicked in and in less than 5 s, I began to record everything on my phone.

The sister was now threatening to "out me". She claimed to know my bosses. She knew everyone in the Valley! She dropped a slew of big names I won’t repeat. Irritated that I was recording her, she yelled "yes, why not go post on @TechCrunch why you robbed my sister" (exact words)

The housemate grabbed my phone and started to delete the videos. A neighbor who had come out to check what the commotion was about realized what was happening and asked me to leave with him. He demanded that they hand my phone back to me.

Still in my PJs, I grabbed my bag, my phone and my passport and hurried out of the house. Just as I was walking out, the sister said something derogatory about where I was *from*. Something in my already woozy brain crumbled at that moment and I broke down utterly shocked.

Four cops arrived in two cars and by now we were all outside. I sat on my stoop, frightened as f*ck while the two tried to convince the cops I was a thief at 1 AM in the middle of the street. How was any of this real?

I'm a South Asian woman in SF, in tech with a crap ton of privilege and live to tell the tale, in a way that I know black and brown people don’t get to.

But in that moment, I felt vulnerable as a foreigner, clutching my my passport (why was I carrying my pp? Immigrant instinct).

The two continued to berate me and call me names. The cops were sympathetic and tried to calm them down without much success. Cops present, the sister continued to allude to where I worked and how connected she was (Fortunately, on record).

“I’m untouchable (sic)” the sister kept yelling, alluding to how connected she was in the tech industry. It sounds unreal even as I type it, so I had to go back and check the video for her exact words.

In the days after, we found that my cards had been used at various stores on Market Street, Union Square that evening. The cops found grainy videos of people in these stores. But the two had wasted no time in making a giant ruckus based on…what? Where I was born.

Days later, the housemate apologized and tried to call truce when she realized I had recovered all videos. (PRO TIP - iPhones don’t delete images and videos and save them in a hidden folder for 30 days). I sent the videos to the landlord and my friends, just in case.

I promised I wouldn’t share them in public but fat chance I was deleting them. I spent the next few weeks seething and wanted to know why they’d behaved so, it was surreal and made no sense.

I didn’t have to go far in my search but what I found is almost too good to be true -- The sister worked for a major bank as an investment advisor and had a Finra broker disclosure online for a shoplifting charge from around 2008 (since removed; she’d pleaded Not Guilty.)

If I weren’t livid, I’d have appreciated the irony. This woman had spent hours verbally abusing me, humiliating me and calling names, trying to coax the cops into believing I’d orchestrated petty theft.

The housemate eventually dropped the pretense of cordiality and sent racist emails to me ("This isn't India"), accused the rest of us of orchestrating the entire fiasco, and threatening to sue the landlord (who btw is a partner at a major law firm, lol).

I’ve told this story at several dinner parties to the amusement and horror of many friends. Once it was all over, I thought it was hilarious, like an absurdist play. Nearly a year later, I walked into a therapist’s office one day and told the entire story in one breath..

...sputtering with rage and resentment at what they’d said and done, surprising myself at the intensity of these emotions or that it bothered me so much after so many months.

No matter how I saw myself, on that day, I was reduced to being a girl with brown skin and a foreign accent, accused of theft in her own goddamn house by two white women in designer clothes.

It didn’t matter that one of them had sought career advice from me a day prior. Or that I knew the same people they claimed to know. Titles, labels all the things that offer delusions of respectability and trick you into thinking you are insulated from misjudgment were moot.

When I watched the video Chris Cooper took, my first thought was that Amy isn’t angry about being called out. She is angry about being called out by a black man. Even in her rage, she knows exactly the power she has over him.

She knows that when the cops arrive, she has the upper hand and she was going to use her advantage to show someone his supposed place, even if that meant the possibility of him being wounded or killed.

I try to operate under the simple assumption that people try to be good. But after an experience like this, no matter how much you try to resolve that people are mostly good, it is impossible to remove all trace of doubt.

Even now, I regularly catch myself noting how different I look, how different I sound and if these parameters beyond my control make me less credible or less impressive or terrifyingly, more vulnerable.

This horrible thing happened to me at home, where I ought to have been safe. I was attacked by people who had loved noting how we were “in the same circles”.

I’m not delusional. These things don’t happen to me all the time and even as I write all this it feels unreal.

I went back and watched those videos as if to confirm this really happened. I can barely trust this is real, how then would anyone? What if I hadn’t recorded this bizarre event?

TL;DR, when encountering a Karen in the wild ALWAYS RECORD ASAP. [End of thread]