Last month a teenager was using a helicopter drone mounted with a camera to take creepy creep pictures of women at Hammonasset beach in Madison, Connecticut until he was confronted by an upset woman, Andrea Mears. Words were exchanged as Mears attempted to restrain the teen and call police, but then something went awry and the older woman went extreme #YesAllWomen and ended up giving that little sh*t the beatdown I’m positive he richly deserved.
The teen, for his part, made sure to hang on to his camera phone for dear life to capture the entire confrontation on video, and Mears was charged with assault. NBC 5 reports:
It all started when a teen, Austin Haughwout, was using a remote-controlled aircraft with a camera attached to it to film beach-goers while hovering overhead. Since it’s in a public area, it’s all perfectly legal to photograph people, but it made one woman, Andrea Mears, uncomfortable.
That’s when she says she asked him what he was doing and he began to fumble with his equipment.
“In the video you see my arm go out like this because he has a cell phone in his hand and that’s when he punches me in the back of the head and grabs me by the hair,” said Mears.
But Haughwout has a different story, “She was the one that attacked me as you can see in the video. She took a swing at me and I began falling to the ground.”
OK, two things to take away here: Yes, it’s technically legal to take pictures of people on a beach. However, if you walk around with a camera standing just a few feet away from a woman while pointing a camera at her boobs, there’s gonna be a prahlum. Does that make it any different to accomplish basically the same thing using a drone with a camera, just because you, yourself, are not physically taking the pictures? Kind of like how people can be total goblins on the internet because they’re hiding behind the anonymity of a computer?
Second thing. It’s wrong to hit people. I GUESS. But if anyone ever had it coming to them in the most Joffrey Bieber way possible, it’s this kid. I mean just watch the video and tell me, male or female, that you don’t want to punch this brat in his smarmy f*cking face yourself:
Yeah, pretty much. And while this should have been a total “lesson learned” moment for Austin Haughwout, (lesson being, don’t take creepshots of women because they will beat your ass) because we’ve raised a society of Very Special Young People nurtured on gold stars and participation awards, Haughwout has abhorrently started an Indiegogo campaign to fund his civil lawsuit against Andrea Mears, which has so far only raised $382 — probably from a scant few mens’ right activists.
Sure, Indiegogo has accomplished a lot of good and funded countless cancer debts and community gardens, but after this I hope they have a long, hard think about what they’ve done.
UPDATE: This is allegedly the video that Haughwout had taken the day of the incident. If I was off base with my assumptions in this article then I sincerely apologize.