Woman’s Hostile Apple Store Encounter with Sean Spicer Goes Viral

Shree Spicer Apple Store

Image via Chris Bacon

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A woman ran who ran into White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in an Apple Store and live streamed the event, footage of which quickly went viral.

The encounter wasn’t exactly a friendly one, however. The woman, 33-year-old Shree Chauhan of Washington, D.C., said she wanted to “speak truth to power,” and accosted Spicer with questions. “How does it feel to work for a fascist,” she asked the press secretary. “How do you feel about destroying the country?” Chauhan also brought up Russian, and accused President Trump of committing treason.

Not that Spicer didn’t fire back — “Such a great country that allows you to be here,” Spicer apparently told her — a comment that, as an Indian-American, she regarded as threatening and racist. Chauhan was born in the United States to Indian immigrant parents. “I am still stunned by the boldness of having my citizenship threatened on camera,” she wrote of the encounter in a Medium post.

Chauhan did acknowledge that she was “not polite” to Spicer, but added that “it’s one thing to have a Twitter egg say you do not belong in America, it is quite another to have the Press Secretary of the United States of America do so.” Chauhan told Time that she has “no regrets” about the confrontation. “There are people that think I was rude, I was impolite, and I understand that,” she told the publication. “He was just going about his regular business, and I get that. But it’s interesting to me that someone could go upon their regular business while supporting the tyranny of this administration.”

The former teacher, who is vocally opposed to the Trump administration’s recent immigration policies, said that she has received a slew of online harassment since posting the video Saturday, according to the Washington Post. “They tell me to leave the country. They have told me to go back to where I came from,” Chauhan wrote on Medium. “To which my snarky reply is often, ‘Go back where? New York?’”

Spicer later addressed the confrontation during the daily White House press conference on March 13. A journalist asked what people should do if they run into him and have a question. “Ask it,” Spicer responded. “I interact with individuals all day long. Ninety-nine percent of them are pleasant even with people who may not agree with our philosophy or programs or whatever. But it’s a free country and the beauty of it is that people can act how they want, no matter how that’s interpreted. And as long as they stay on the right side of the First Amendment, we’re good.”

As far as what Sean Spicer was shopping for at the Apple retail outlet, one source said that it was an Apple Watch Sport, according to Gizmodo.

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