There is plenty of blame to go around for both McHenry and Advanced Towing. People should not be demanding her firing unless and until the complete and unedited tape is released.
As everyone knows by now, ESPN’s Britt McHenry gained a lot more fame than she ever had on the sidelines when she had a recent run-in with a woman clerk at a towing company. McHenry showed up to get her car that had been towed from the parking lot of a northern Virginia Chinese restaurant. She had left the vehicle in the parking lot all night.
A security tape released by the towing company shows a distraught McHenry unloading on the clerk, a single mother of three. The ESPN personality begins by bragging she is on television, and tells the clerk she has a degree while the clerk has no education. McHenry tells the clerk she has a brain while the clerk does not. McHenry later goes on to make fun of the clerk’s missing teeth and again says she is on television while the clerk is in “a f*****g trailer.” The video ends with McHenry telling the woman “lose some weight, baby girl.”
The tape has since gone viral and McHenry has been suspended for one week. Many people are calling for her to be fired from the sports network. A petition on change.org calling on ESPN to fire her has, at the time of this writing, received over 15,000 signatures.
But something is very wrong with the video released by Advanced Towing, the Arlington, Virginia company that towed McHenry’s car. The video starts with McHenry already at the counter and saying she is on television. It strains credulity to believe the television personality went up to the counter and began the conversation that way. The company’s surveillance video does not show McHenry walking up to the counter. More importantly, it does not show any words spoken by either woman that preceded McHenry’s statement of being on television before beginning her tirade about education, teeth and weight.
Advanced Towing has a bad reputation, even for a company in an industry that is not looked upon kindly. NBC Washington reports according to the Arlington police, Advanced has had 155 complaints between 2012 and 2014; about twice as many as the number of complaints made against all other Arlington towing companies.
Advanced Towing has an “F” rating with the Better Business Bureau and a lot of negative comments on websites such as Yelp. People have accused the company of towing legally parked cars. One woman claims she handed them a credit card and was told her card was rejected. She then paid with another card and ended up being billed twice, once on each card.
The video was not one taken by an independent third person; rather it was the company’s surveillance tape and it was presumably released by Advanced Towing. Videos shot by passersby to an event are troubling enough. For example videos where police officers appears to use excessive force are problematic. Something relevant inevitably happens that causes the person or person to begin videotaping the event and in many cases this preceding event is necessary to give context to what later happens.
But this was the company’s surveillance camera that presumably was running all the time. They chose where to begin the portion of the tape that was released.
Us Weeklyreports the tape was altered. A source told them that McHenry did not initially say she was on television just to brag; rather she added that she knew from the news about all the lawsuits against Advanced Towing. The source added comments made by McHenry about the lawsuits were edited out.
There is no doubt McHenry is not a very nice person. No matter what happened, her comments about the lack of the clerk’s education, her teeth and her weight were uncalled for because she was mad at the towing company. And, as is common for someone of her generation, the 28-year-old tweeted an apology but has not personally apologized to the clerk.
Was the one-week punishment enough or should McHenry lose her job? That decision should not be made on evidence that appears to anyone to be incomplete. There is plenty of blame to go around for both McHenry and Advanced Towing. People should not be demanding her firing unless and until the complete and unedited tape is released.
The video can be seen here.
