Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, shown on video assaulting Shohel Mahmud after he began reciting prayer in Arabic

A New York woman who pepper-sprayed a Muslim Uber driver while he was praying has been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on hate crime charges.

Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, is shown in a surveillance video repeatedly pepper-spraying her Uber driver, Shohel Mahmud. The assault took place in August on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near the corner of east 65th Street and Lexington Avenue, shortly after Mahmud began reciting a prayer in Arabic.

Guilbeault’s former employer, the public relations and marketing firm D Pagan Communications, wrote on X it is aware of her actions and “don’t condone this behavior”.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    How other people pray is none of your business. You don’t get to decide what is “normal”. If other peoples’ prayers upset you, then you can die mad for all I care.

    • Sarmyth@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I don’t have to decide what is normal. I can experience what is normal. I don’t get mad when people pray, I just don’t like it done in front of me while I am trapped in a small space with them.

      • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        I don’t get mad when people pray, I just don’t like it done in front of me while I am trapped in a small space with them.

        So what you’re saying is that you get mad when people pray.

        • Sarmyth@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          No… I get annoyed when people put me in position where I have no reason to expect them to start praying, and the only method of distancing myself from that act would be extraordinary inconvenient for me.

          Pray 20 hours a day for all I care, to whatever God you want. Leave me out of it.

    • nomous@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      How other people pray is none of your business

      Unless I’m paying them to take me somewhere, then it’s definitely my business why they aren’t doing that.

      Shit is rarely just black and white as much as we’d all like that to be the case.

      • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        What an absolutely awful person you are…

        If other people’s cultures and religions offend you, stay inside and remain alone, for all of our sakes.