Bar owner sues TikTokker over viral video claiming she was ‘manhandled’

A Chicago bar owner is fighting back against a TikTokker after she claimed in a viral video that she was “manhandled” by one of its security guards and sent “flying down the staircase.”

Hubbard Inn owner Carmen Rossi argues that Julia Reel, 22, defamed the restaurant with a narrative that he says is easily refuted by security camera footage, according to the lawsuit obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

He says the now-deleted video cost the restaurant more than $30,000 in lost revenue as a dozen groups canceled their reservations, and the establishment received an onslaught of one-star reviews on Yelp, as well as threats of violence against staff members.

In the video, Reel claimed that she and her friend were assaulted by security guards in a second-floor bathroom in the early morning hours of March 10.

“So they are grabbing us immediately, they don’t even give us a chance to walk out on our own,” she said in the video, which others have reposted to TikTok.

“I’m immediately grabbed by this man and he’s grabbing my arm, he’s pushing me, he’s manhandling me,” Reel said, going on to claim that the guard dragged her by her purse to pull her outside.

“I’m just pushed down,” she continues. “He sends me flying down the staircase.”

The guard then “takes me a second time and shoves me again, and sends me flying down the rest of the staircase,” Reel claimed.

She called it the “craziest experience I’ve ever been in” and was “completely and utterly ridiculous,” as she urged other Chicagoans to avoid the restaurant, according to the suit filed Monday in Cook County court.

Reel also filed a police report claiming that she visited a local hospital in the aftermath and was treated for a “bruised-up arm and head,” which struck the floor, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

But Carmen Rossi, the owner of the establishment, hit back at Reel’s claims in its own video last week, in which it spliced together Reel’s remarks with security footage showing her and a friend walking safely down the stairs and out of the restaurant with a security guard steps behind them.

It does not appear from the video that the security guard ever touched either of the girls.

“This clearly contradicts her false allegations that she was ‘grabb[ed],’ ‘manhandle[d]’ and ‘dragg[ed] out of the bathroom and into the hallway and ‘shoved’ down the stairs, sending her ‘flying down the staircase,’” the lawsuit states, according to the Tribune.

It goes on to claim that Rossi tried to contact Reel after she posted the video, asking her to take it down, but never heard back.

He was then forced to file the suit after attorneys for Reel uploaded another video “attacking our establishment,” a spokesman for Rossi told the Tribune.

“We are a small business and the staff is family, which is why we had no choice but to take this step,” he said.

Reel’s attorneys claimed the restaurant’s footage presents a “misleading narrative,” and urged the public to avoid “a rush to judgment and/or victim shaming.”

They said the video footage has an unexplained two-minute gap and does not show the part of the staircase where Reel was allegedly pushed.

Attorneys for Rossi also note in the suit that the edited footage has a 45-second gap and does not show eight steps of the staircase.

As of Monday, nobody had been arrested in the now-viral incident, police told the Sun-Times.

The case will now go to court on May 23, according to NBC Chicago.