Woman Confronts 'Disgusting' Men Taking Pictures of Young Beachgoers
A video of a young woman standing up to two men taking photographs of her and other female beachgoers without their consent has gone viral online.
Footage of the incident was posted to the Reddit r/PublicFreakout page on Friday and took place at Fort Myers Beach in Florida. Although not much context was provided by the user who posted the video, the video was uploaded with the caption, "Girl catches old man taking photos of young girls (presumably minors) on the beach in Florida."
The video starts with the concerned young woman approaching two older men at a table a few steps away from her group's setup.
"I have you on [recording] right now, I would like to see you delete my pictures that you took of me and to delete all these other women's pictures that you're taking," she demands.
The older man complies and shows her his camera roll. The first photo that appears on the screen appears to be a woman with her back to the camera facing the ocean; it is not clear if she consented to the picture.
"Delete them all right now. All of them!" she demands.
The man again follows her instructions. He deletes a few additional images before he comes across a screenshot from another app, implying that that was the last of the photos he had sneakily taken.
The woman does not believe him, and begins scrolling through his camera history to find additional photos of beachgoers seemingly taken without permission.
She yells repeatedly that he "delete ... all of these" photos, and asks, "Where's mine in here?" Her shouts grow higher in pitch and in several moments her voice breaks.
"I'm not gonna go away. You guys are f*****g perverts, taking pictures of all these people," the girl says.
The other man with the suspected creep claims, "I'm a pervert? I'm just sitting here. I don't even have a phone."
"This man does, and you guys are taking pictures of all these women," she retorts. "That is disgusting."
She again demands that he delete the photos he took of her, though he claims, "I don't have you." She alleges that she saw him aiming his cell phone at her.
She scrolls again through his photo reel, ending the video with close-ups of their faces.
"If you guys know these people, these people are f*****g perverts and they're at Fort Myers Beach," she adds.
The video was upvoted on Reddit over 7,000 times by horrified viewers, who commiserated in the comments section that while the woman's actions were laudable, there likely was no organized way to enforce that they stop taking photos like these in the future.
"It's creepy as f**k, I want to make my feelings perfectly clear on that. However strictly from a legal sense, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public beach," one viewer wrote. Another agreed: "Yep it's creepy but if you're in public people can legally take pictures but still creepy."
Others worried that while the woman made sure they deleted the photos from his camera roll, there was a chance they could be recovered from the trash folder on his phone.
"It's creepy AF but let's be real all the photos he deleted will be in his recently deleted folder. He'll just recover them once she stops yelling at him," they commented.
Some even chimed in with their own experiences of being photographed without consent in public.
"Dude, people take pics of strangers all the time. I'm 6'7 and big and randos try to take 'sneaky' pics of me all the time," one Redditor shared. "I've had people slowly shuffle beside me and get someone to try take a pic like we're hanging out or something."
Another remembered a department store incident she was involved in: "I was in Target a couple of years ago and heard a woman yelling for help in the dressing room ... The young woman came out and said she noticed him under the door taking her picture while she changed."
In the instance of the original video, it was not immediately clear if law enforcement became involved after the camera stopped filming.
This viral video is the latest in which a "creepy man" was put on the spot after he was caught photographing young women from afar. Earlier this month, a TikToker confronted her "stalker" in the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona after she caught him photographing her as well.
