‘If You Were My Slave, I Could Kiss You’: Vile Video Pranksters Arrested Days After Subjecting Woman to Unwanted Overtures, Vulgar Language

A New York City woman who was taunted, terrorized and harassed by two twisted video pranksters last week has spoken exclusively to the Sun about the vile provocateurs she bravely repelled. Her alleged assailants were arrested on Thursday.Derisha Boothe, who is black, was walking in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood when she was targeted by two young pranksters, who dress as MAGA supporters and livestream themselves behaving offensively in decidedly anti-MAGA Manhattan for their YouTube channel, @scrubsnyc. One of the men, wearing a red MAGA cap, launched a lascivious word salad, allegedly laced with the N-word, and made various sleazy advances at Ms. Boothe (such as suggesting she become his “slave” so she could perform sexual acts on him) — before getting down on the ground and trying to burn her boot with a lighter.“He told me, ‘If you were my slave, I could kiss you,’” Ms. Boothe recounted to the Sun on the day of her attackers’ arrest. Derisha Boothe, whose face is concealed for her privacy, confronts one of her harassers and records video of him. NYPD / RedditShe was reflecting on the despicable verbal and physical ordeal she endured when she was on her way to pick up her birthday cake from a baker pal (she turned 54 the day before). While heading down West 26th Street near Seventh Avenue at around 3 p.m. on February 19, Ms. Boothe said the two numskulls — identified later by cops as Michael Santiago, 31, and Michael James, 33 (who share an apartment on the Upper East Side) — pointed a camera in her face and shouted all kinds of racist and sexually-charged innuendos. The man in the MAGA hat approached her and told her, “You’re a beautiful. Give me a kiss.”Without her being able to answer, Ms. Boothe said he “walked all the way up to me and attempted to kiss me.”But she forcefully demurred. “I pushed him,” she said. After shooting down his advances, Ms. Boothe said she told him she “didn’t owe you a kiss”. Ms. Boothe remembers shoving the fiend away, and shrieking, “Excuse me! me! Wow!” She continued: “I’m like, ‘No, I don’t owe you anything; I’m gonna never kiss you.”In their public statement released on Wednesday, New York Police Department officers, who were seeking to find and arrest the two men, described how Ms. Boothe tried to get away from her harassers, but they allegedly “prevented her from leaving.” Indeed, the sickos stayed put and remained undaunted, and then turned more aggressive. Ms. Boothe claims one of the men got extremely close to her face as he proposed she become his sex slave. “I told him, ‘I’m never gonna be your slave or whatever,’” she explained. But the maniac persisted, according to Ms. Boothe. “He went on to be more derogatory,” she said, describing how he proposed she perform on him a vile sexual act. “And if I was a slave I’d [expletive] and how I’m a N—–, I’m a [expletive].”After the smooch-stealing attempts failed, the pervert in the MAGA costume could be seen sinking to his knees on the sidewalk and holding up a lighter, lightly searing the woman’s black boots (cops reported the boots cost $89).Police confirmed the suspect “set her boots on fire.” The violated woman then took out her cell phone and started documenting the twisted tag team’s antics – even as they were documenting their outrageous actions with their own camera. Ms. Boothe says that she provided detectives with the footage.It apparently spawned a citywide manhunt to collar the two unsavories. And on Thursday, both Mr. Santiago and Mr. James were corralled and formally brought up on arson, attempted assault, criminal mischief, menacing as hate crimes, criminal mischief and criminal tampering raps. For Ms. Boothe, her recording likely aided in bringing the deviants into custody to get a taste of justice. “My videos were the ones that the cops used to catch them,” she said with a small hint of satisfaction. But the menaces didn’t make it hard to find them. They splashed the reprehensible exploits in real-time on the duo’s “scrubsnyc” YouTube page, that boasts about 1,670 subscribers (much of the content has been taken down). They also have an Instagram page with 297 followers.The YouTube channel and Instagram page, which use a red hammer and sickle as an avatar, positions Mr. Santiago and Mr. James as artists creating video content. The two lowlifes refer to themselves as “IP2” and profess to make video art in the spirit of a 1960s Italian crude performance art movement known as “Arte Povera” (translated to mean “poor art” given its reliance on minimal materials like twigs, rags, and rocks).Why was Ms. Boothe, beyond being black, selected to be the subject of these two punks’ racist prank on that day?She remains lost as to their motives. “I don’t know anything about these people,” she said. “I never saw them before this incident. I never – I was not familiar with these people at all.”“I was just walking and they picked me. They were just two strange men who walked up to me. And attempted to touch me.”

‘If You Were My Slave, I Could Kiss You’: Vile Video Pranksters Arrested Days After Subjecting Woman to Unwanted Overtures, Vulgar Language

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