People have rushed to defend a TikToker who seemingly fell victim to some "mean girls" during a baseball game last week.
The TikToker - who goes by Jackie La Bonita - was at a Houston Astros game last Wednesday (April 19) when she and the man she attended with decided to start taking pictures and film a video. The clip was posted to her account over the weekend and captioned: "Please be nice #meangirls #meangirlvibes."
"Watch my confidence disappear after these random girls make fun of make for taking pics," she said in the video, which has since garnered more than 40 million views and almost 10 million likes.
After La Bonita starts filming, however, two women sitting a few rows back from her can be seen laughing in the background. One also repeatedly flips off the camera and says "lame." La Bonita wrote on the video that the incident made her feel like crying and completely diminished her self-confidence.
Following the publishing of the video, many users found the women on social media and even sent them death threats. Amid the drama that ensued, the two women released a two-part video sharing their side of the story, in which they asked La Bonita to delete the viral TikTok.
According to them, the women say the incident started when the man La Bonita was with began filming for an extended period of time, claiming they believed that he had been filming them.
"The flicking off was not aimed toward her. The flicking off was aimed toward the camera. Any young lady in a public area would feel harassed [...] We were not bullying her. It was not our intention to make her feel like she wanted to cry or that we were messing with her self-confidence," they said.
The two women also accused La Bonita of ruining their reputation, and that she cut the video to make them appear nastier than they were.
Fellow TikTok users rushed to the comments section underneath the apology videos to defend La Bonita, with one person writing: "Why can't they just say sorry. they literally double down on their behavior."
"Ohhhh these girls are not sorry….the attitude," someone else added.
"They claimed it was 'photobombing' and also that a 'older man sat in front of them and started recording them' in the same video…." a further user chimed in.
Another comment read: "It looks that they are just trying to justify the way they behaved, giirl it doesn't matter all the excuses, it's still wrong."
La Bonita - a shopping influencer with nearly 350,000 followers on TikTok - has been mostly quiet since posting the video.
