Jonathan Barlow in late-night video
Jonathan Barlow, who is polling at the bottom in the race for Detroit mayor, is getting some unwanted publicity from a late-night outting in Detroit that won't help his candidacy.
He claims he's been "rage baited." Others accuse him of harassment.
Malachi Barrett of BridgeDetroit reports:
Mayoral candidate Jonathan Barlow is facing a flood of negative online attention spawned from viral videos depicting an encounter with a group of women who say he harassed them on a night out.
Snapshots of the Saturday morning interaction were detailed in six short videos that have garnered 3 million views and counting. Videos posted by the women show Barlow following them down the street while they tell him to leave, recording them with his phone in one hand and holding a drink in the other, then apparently knocking the phone out of one woman’s hand while she was recording.
Barlow tells BridgeDetroit that the videos were taken out of context to create a false narrative against him. He denies harassing the women.
“You can hear them joking in the background the whole time, and that’s what threw me off – is this real or is this fake?” Barlow said. “My social media team says I’ve been rage baited. Some women will do this because it’s the influencer world, but that’s the crazy thing about politics right now.”
