A woman on TikTok has been documenting her battle with a restaurant owner who doxed her after she left a bad review. In fact, things have escalated so much that she’s had to go to court. So how did this all come about from a simple bad review?
TikTok user kissedbymel shared her experience with Gordo’s restaurant online; she posted a video on April 3rd, which was actually the day before she was due to appear in court to answer harassment charges. She gives a brief summary of her whole ordeal so far, although she’s been documenting her battle with the business owner since they doxed her back in January.
I don’t know what it is with restaurants lately, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone exposing an eating establishment for shady behavior on TikTok.
The timeline of events
Mel orders food from the restaurant and the order is supposedly wrong, so she calls the restaurant and has a heated exchange with the manager. On January 12th, Mel leaves a one star review and two days later, she is doxed by the manager, who revealed her husband’s full name, as well as her phone number. She receives a text from someone claiming to be the wife of the owner, threatening Mel and making racist remarks as well as naming the street she was living on.
After all of this, Mel made her first TikTok covering what was going on; this prompted the owner to file a false police report claiming harassment, according to Mel. That brings us up to the court appearance. So the day before she was due to plead her case, Mel posted the TikTok, briefly explaining the ridiculous set of circumstances that had led her to this point, and claimed she had the evidence to prove she was telling the truth. However, she expressed doubt over whether the judge would see her side of the story due to the color of her skin, “because I’m Black in America, um, I partly feel like this is not gonna go my way.”
Anyone who had been keeping up with the story would think the judge was going to come to a conclusion in her favor, but that was not the case. In a follow-up TikTok posted afterwards, Mel claimed that no one even looked at her evidence, and that the judge didn’t believe her solely because the other guy was a business owner. “He asked me, ‘why would a business owner lie and say that you were harassing him if you weren’t?’” Yeah that’s some pretty messed up logic.
Whilst we obviously don’t have the whole story ,the fact that there are a number of one star reviews that criticize “aggressive” staff on Google Reviews, along with a few others on TripAdvisor do suggest Gordo’s has a bit of a problem with how it treats its customers.
Despite this, Mel was found guilty of harassment. She has since given an update saying that she does intend to appeal the decision, and many of the comments underneath her video recommend she lawyer up this time — which it looks like she’s doing, as there is now a GoFundMe to help cover her legal fees.