Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, shown on video assaulting Shohel Mahmud after he began reciting prayer in Arabic
A New York woman who pepper-sprayed a Muslim Uber driver while he was praying has been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on hate crime charges.
Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, is shown in a surveillance video repeatedly pepper-spraying her Uber driver, Shohel Mahmud. The assault took place in August on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near the corner of east 65th Street and Lexington Avenue, shortly after Mahmud began reciting a prayer in Arabic.
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Guilbeault’s former employer, the public relations and marketing firm D Pagan Communications, wrote on X it is aware of her actions and “don’t condone this behavior”.
If that’s their compulsion they can do it while not actively working. In between pickups etc. I personally find it obnoxiously pious to make others unwilling participants in your praying. A person’s driver is in too intimate a setting to be doing stuff like that.
I wouldn’t give a shit if they were a bus driver though because that’s already a more public environment where I’m not expecting the driver to be talking to me if they are talking. (I also find it annoying when the driver is on the phone in an Uber for similar reasons). If they were being annoying I have the ability to move myself a little further out of earshot. In a private car, the only way to avoid it is to end the ride and find a new one, which would be incredibly inconvenient.