Woman Praised for Confronting a 'Harassing' Man at the Gym and Shares Viral Video
A recent video from TikTok user Chelsie Gleason has gone viral, showing the shocking moment the 20-year-old from Texas was approached and touched by a man in the weights room.
"I was just trying to workout when this happens," the text reads in the video that shows the entire incident. "I've never met this guy and he's been harassing me for months," Gleason continues as the man gets closer her during her workout. After the man approaches her, Gleason says "I kept my headphones in and tried to ignore him."
Undeterred, the man walks a few paces behind Gleason and tries to touch her, to which Gleason responds loudly "Don't come near me!"
The man quickly backs off and walks away, while Gleason picks up her device that was filming the incident. After the video was posted to popular video app TikTok–Gleason captioned it 'being a female is fun'–Gleason received tens of thousands of responses.
"Ladies: Don't ever be afraid to be loud and cause a scene if a man is making you uncomfortable," one user commented.
"The fact that you gracefully ignored him and he still had the audacity to get THAT close to you KNOWING you weren't interested," another user wrote.
Related video: Four girls talk about their daily experiences with sexual harassment
After the original video, Gleason went on to provide another video explaining the situation and providing TikTok viewers with an update. (Continued below)
"When I first had an interaction with this guy, he was, he seemed like just a random nice guy that would come up and talk to people in the gym.
"After weeks and weeks and weeks of this happening, you know, it started getting a little weird. Like, why is he approaching me, I've already told him, you know, leave me alone. I don't really need your help. I don't really want your advice. I'm not asking you for anything. Just kind of leave me alone," Gleason says in the video.
"So me and my friends started noticing his weird behaviour, he would go up to random people and talk about weird conspiracy stuff, you know, black vans following him, you know, people's personalities being changed."
"When he turned around, he called me a f*****g traitor, which, you know, he's called me before, so I didn't think anything of it, honestly, at that point," she continued, focusing on what the stranger said to her in the gym.
"Staff is well aware, we're all watching him. We're not really doing too much, because he's just, it's all verbal. And it's nothing threatening, really, until about a couple weeks ago.
"So a couple of weeks ago, we had a really horrible interaction with him. I was with some of my girlfriends working out and he came up to us and I was just like, dude, just f**k off. Leave us alone. We don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I've told you before just f**k off.
"And he called me crazy, called me a b***h, literally got all defensive. He would follow me around areas of the gym, just make weird comments to me harass me, and a lot of my gym brothers, they would have my back, they made sure that I got to my car safely."
Continuing, Gleason went onto explain that the man has since been arrested. "Finally, after this video blew up, we got his name, we got ahold of him. He's banned. He can't come back.
"When I got to the gym last night, they informed me that he tried to come back and the police were called and he was arrested. And they found he already had a warrant out for stalking another girl.
"So but there you go, that's pretty much it. He's in jail. Now he's kicked out. He's banned, everybody safe."
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