The other day a video came across my desk that was purportedly yet another offshoot of that Hollaback! video of a woman walking around New York City for ten hours straight. Only in this video, titled “Drunk Girl In Public (Social Experiment),” a young, attractive woman is seen stumbling around Hollywood Boulevard, acting drunk and drinking a mystery beverage out of a paper bag. The young woman is approached by several men who offer to take her home and even provide her with more alcohol, but watching I thought to myself, this chick is annoying and this sh*t looks fake.
Looks like I wasn’t far off, because The Smoking Gun reports that the video was indeed a hoax, masterminded by 20-year-old Stephen Zhang and his partner, 22-year-old Seth Leach. OK fine, internet hoaxes are dumb, but common enough. In this case however, the “pervs” approaching the young woman (in fact, 24-year-old actress, Jennifer Box), were told that they were participating in a “student film” or “comedy sketch” — when in fact the video was presented to look like anything but. At the time of this writing, the video has over 7.5 million views.
Josh Blaine, the shaggy-haired man wearing sunglasses in the video, drives a Hollywood tour bus. In a message to his Facebook friends, Blaine said that he did “a favor for some camera crew guess this is what I get for being agreeable to someones project.” He added that, “it was supposed to be a funny skit. here’s to watching my back with virtually no friends. f*ck my life.”
Another man seen at the end of the video tells Box, “You’re in no shape to be walking around like this,” and offers to take her to his place, where he has “more beer.” The man, Mike “Mokii” Koshak, works as a sales rep for LA Epic, a firm that arranges nightclub crawls. Stationed in Hollywood, Koshak tries to sell tickets to tourists and other customers.
Koshak’s boss, LA Epic owner Christine Peters, told TSG that “Mokii was taken advantage of” when asked to “say a couple of lines for a comedy sketch.” Peters said, “They made it seem like he was trying to take the girl home.” Since the name of Peters’s company can be seen on Koshak’s t-shirt and hat, Peters said she was upset the firm had been “dragged into it,” since “we don’t condone such behavior.”
When a couple of the men reached out to Zhang and Leach to express their shock and outrage that they were being branded as rapists across the internet, they were told to “Just go with it dude, you are in our team now and we will take care of you.” LOL! Everyone thinks you’re a rapist, just go with it and this 20-year-old kid is going to make you a star!
None of the men who spoke with The Smoking Gun had actually signed any waivers or releases, so I hope these kids come from wealthy families because it sounds like things are about to get litigious up in here.
(I’m not embedding this crap, but if you must watch for context, you can find the video here before it’s inevitably taken down.)