How an internet mob falsely painted a Chipotle employee as racist
(CNN)Dominique Moran knew something was wrong as soon as she awakened that Friday morning. She turned on her smartphone and saw the first of what would become a barrage of texts and voicemails.
"Are you okay?"
"I just wanted you to know there's a video of you going around with you and this person..."
"Hey, you're on Twitter."
Only the night before, Moran was an unknown 23-year-old student in St. Paul, Minnesota. She had moved there from Southern California to attend college on a softball scholarship. Living alone in a new city, she worked at a Chipotle to make ends meet and attended a Lutheran church.
That morning, though, she discovered she had become someone else. Strangers were calling her nasty names on social media. Her photo was plastered across internet news sites. A video was circulating online, and she was its villain. In it, she could be seen refusing to serve a group of black men at the restaurant the previous evening.t started about 10 minutes before closing time on a Thursday night. A group of about a half-dozen young black men walked in, chatting loudly among themselves while aiming smartphone cameras at Chipotle employees.
"They're back," one of Moran's colleagues told her as the men streamed into the food line.
Moran recognized two of them. Only two days before, she said, their credit cards had been declined when they lined up to pay. She had also been warned about them not paying before, and seen video footage of them "dining and dashing." They had ordered their food in the takeout line, given the cashier a credit card, then dashed with their food after the card was declined.
"You gotta' pay 'cause you never have money when you come in," Moran told them.
The men erupted in indignation. At least one started recording.
"She's making crazy accusations."
"Y'all racist!"Moran's mother is still so disturbed by what happened that she declined to speak to CNN for this story. But Moran's sister, Elizabeth Perez, recalled how their mother reacted to the video.
"I just remember her breaking down," Perez said. "She cried. She was like, 'I don't want people hurting my daughter.' ''
There were obvious holes, though, in the emerging online narrative. Start with a basic question Perez asked after she noticed the way people kept referring to her sister in online discussions.
"When they said 'racist white woman,' I was like, 'My sister is not white,'" Perez said. "I was just so confused."
The incident was framed as a white person's humiliation of black men, but Moran is Mexican-American. Still, many people kept identifying her as white as her story spread.
Why didn't someone notice she wasn't white as the video rocketed around social media?