A lurid story of assault in an NYC bar unleashed TikTok mob justice and spiraled out of control — twice

• A woman was falsely accused of attacking a fellow TikToker in a bathroom in Tribeca last year.
• Esther Cho only knew she had been accused when she was hit by a tide of accusations.

Two nightmare scenarios came true at once for Esther Cho a year ago. She went viral through no intention of her own, and she was falsely accused of a crime.

Cho was thrust into the center of a TikTok firestorm when a vigilante effort wrongly identified her as a woman accused of attacking somebody in a Manhattan bar.

She told Insider she was inundated with threats and racist abuse from people who believed the accusation, despite there being no evidence it was her.

She mounted a fightback to clear her name, eventually persuaded everyone — including her accusers — that she was innocent, after larger social-media stars championed her story.

The pendulum swung so far that the woman who made the first accusation then suffered her own pile-on, prompting her to mostly wipe herself from the internet.

Their story is an extreme example of online mob justice, where people are declared guilty on shaky grounds, and find the burden is on them to prove they didn't do anything wrong.

A wild accusation

The drama began with a video, which Insider has seen, published on May 19, 2022, by Stefany Romero on her TikTok account @lanicoleta. The video and the whole account were later deleted.

Romero showed videos of her face, claiming to have been scratched, beaten, and robbed the previous night while at the City Vineyards bar in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan.

In a phone call with Insider, Romero described her attack in some detail, and sent images which she said showed her injuries.

She said the attacker racially abused her for being white (though Romero is Latina), pulled her hair, then ran away. She said she called the NYPD but that its officers were dismissive and "didn't do anything."

Insider couldn't corroborate her account, or independently determine what happened that night.

The NYPD told Insider it had no record of an attack at the bar that night, and City Vineyard didn't respond to requests for comment. The NYPD didn't respond to questions about Romero's interactions with its officers.

But Romero's story took on a life of its own after she posted her story to TikTok. She described a woman with dark hair who was about 100 lbs heavier than her.

Cho, meanwhile, had a regular day: working, going to a gym class, then at dinner with friends in Brooklyn. Evidence reviewed by Insider suggests that she was nowhere near Tribeca that night.

When Romero posted her video, Cho didn't notice, nor did those who would later accuse her.

The mob awakens

It was around a month later, on June 22, 2022, that Cho noticed strange activity on her TikTok, where she had fewer than 3,000 followers at the time.

"I stared getting weird comments being like, we know you did it, the police are coming for you, weird messages like that," Cho told Insider.

She said her friends were also approached by an account claiming to be a "private investigator" asking them to confirm Cho's whereabouts that night.

Cho brushed it off as trolls and people trying to scare her. But after landing in Paris for a work trip, she received a worrying message from one of her friends.

"You really need to check your TikTok right now," it said.

Cho's social media was filled with hateful comments, death threats, and racial slurs from people who blamed her for Romero's attack. Cho had no idea what they meant.

Turns out, other TikTokers had been investigating Romero's incident. Some of them found a video of Cho posted where she reviewed Tribeca and gave recommendations there, and made a connection.

Romero had said her attacker was Asian. This, along with Cho having been to Tribeca recently, was enough for many to conclude that Cho was guilty. Romero now accepts Cho had nothing to do with it — but told Insider that she too was convinced at the time.

Romero posted a follow-up video saying TikTok had identified her attacker. She didn't name Cho but described the Tribeca video in enough detail to leave no doubt.

Romero told Insider that a friend who was at the bar with her convinced her that Cho was to blame, and says she hoped she would be able to report Cho to the police — though ultimately she didn't.

After Romero endorsed the theory that Cho was to blame, thousands of strangers piled in to make the accusation.

A key moment in the narrative was a TikToker who made a video stitching together Romero's accusation with Cho's Tribeca video, inferring her guilt.

The woman, who gave her name only as Mackenzie, fearing online harassment if she gave a surname, said she now regrets doing that.

"I saw someone was a victim and I wanted to help them because I have a little bit of a platform," Mackenzie told Insider. "But turns out the information that I had was incorrect."

She said she pulled the video after Cho contacted her, and apologized. But by this point, Cho said, it was too late.

"It doesn't matter if you know the story or not, you're looking at it and it's going to look like it's me," Cho said. "But mind you, there's zero evidence. There's literally nothing, no police report, no pictures, no security footage. It's just her saying this stuff.

"I guess everyone just believed her."

Cho said she wanted to set things straight. She messaged Romero, saying that she was innocent (Insider saw screenshots of the exchange).

Cho also told Romero she could prove she had been in other places that day.

Romero didn't give a time for when she said she was attacked, but said it occurred after she had been "day drinking" and before dinner. City Vineyard was open seven hours that day, from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Cho posted two videos detailing what she had been doing all day, showing timestamps of her working in the afternoon, then attending a fitness class at 4:40 p.m. Cho also had two friends vouch for her — her roommate confirmed she was working from home all day until her class, and her other friend says they met up after her class at 6:30 p.m. and had dinner together in Williamsburg.

Cho shared photos from the restaurant in Williamsburg, and photos of the pasta she ate at around 8 p.m. Her friend said they walked around a little after dinner, then both went home. It seemed to leave little opportunity to get to Tribeca and jump somebody.

Cho said she sent this to Romero on Instagram, saying "I was like, 'Hey, I'm so sorry that first of all you were attacked, but it's not me.'"

Romero opened the message, Cho said, but did not respond.

Instead, she seemed to double down on her claim in a further video, saying she and her attacker had both been interviewed by the police. (The NYPD also didn't comment on that claim.)

Romero told Insider that she didn't reply to Cho's message because she was still convinced Cho was her attacker, and had been advised by a friend who was a lawyer not to engage.

Cho decided to tell her story online to clear her name. But the narrative seemed set — Cho said people responded by accusing her of lying and forging the evidence of where she was.

Things started to shift when a prominent TikToker, the comedian Ellen Acuario, posted in Cho's defense and reached a large audience.

It was around this time Romero said she realized Cho was indeed not the woman who attacked her. She posted another video, which she sent to Insider, telling people to stand down.

She also said she never identified Cho by name in her videos.

Romero did admit to fanning the flames of Cho's harassers by posting a comment where she identified Cho's workplace, indirectly suggesting Cho was the attacker.

"That was my biggest mistake," Romero said. "And I really regret ever doing that."

Cho, who in the meantime built up a much larger following, shared her story again a year later on July 17, 2023, prompting a delayed backlash against Romero.

Romero has since deactivated her TikTok page and other social-media accounts, saying she suffered more or less the same fate as Cho: a tide of death threats, personal information published online, and having her loved ones abused as well. She sent Insider dozens of screenshots of messages she received.

Romero said if she could go back and change everything, she would.

"You go online thinking somebody will help you and then they end up hurting another innocent person," she said.

"You end up not only not getting justice for yourself, but you end up accidentally having the internet police and everything just bring the wrath of the internet on someone."

Romero said she would love to make things right with Cho, but she also questioned why Cho was still talking about it a year later.

She said she had tried to apologize, sending Cho direct messages on Instagram from two of her accounts, and a long email last month, but Cho didn't respond. Cho told Insider she had received emails from Romero, but they mostly contained "threats towards me to take all my videos down about her."

Cho told Insider she felt the need to retell her story because what happened still haunts her. Her TikTok posted in July amassed 1.2 million views, which was justice enough for her.

She said she considered suing Romero but decided against it because it would be too time consuming and energetically exhausting (Romero said she was also considering legal action to get Cho's videos taken down, arguing that the posts mean she doesn't feel safe leaving her house alone.)

Reflecting on the phenomenon of accusations spreading on social-media more generally, Cho said: "I know that some people do horrible things and they should definitely take accountability for that and the consequences should be served."

"But I just think when it comes to things that have no actual facts, it needs to be proven before any sort of consequence happens," she said.

Romero had much the same to say: "Nobody on the internet cares about facts. They just want the drama."