A woman dubbed “Santa Clarita Karen” got the ultimate revenge on a tormentor after her threat to call ICE on a street vendor lead to a vicious backlash against her business.
Francesca Ortega went viral after she was captured on video calling a taco vendor a “stinky old woman” and threatening to call ICE on the worker,
In her own video, Ortega said her life and cleaning company in Santa Clarita have been ruined by all the negative attention, with haters bombarding her business with one-star reviews.
“Now all of my livelihood is ruined. The business that I worked so hard to build for 10 years,” Ortega said.
“We had excellent, perfect reviews and it got flooded, flooded by these insane horrible Latino people.”
The business owner said she was upset at the sidewalk vendor because she doesn’t want the valley to look like Los Angeles, and said it was hurting businesses in her community.
Ortega said she and her family received threats and she was afraid to go out in public.
So she decided to exact revenge on one of her critics, Ricardo Morales, by changing her official business number on Google to his phone number.
He told Fox 11 he’s now the one getting all the “angry calls” and texts from people all over the country.
Morales said he had received one message that read, “You should be ashamed of yourself. Saw you on the internet being a disgrace.”
“It’s crazy to think that somebody can be that extremely vindictive and now won’t own up to their actions,” he added.
Ortega said she retaliated because her critics wouldn’t leave her alone.
She insisted she never meant to threaten the vendor and said it all started after the woman took a photo of her license plate.
“I need as much help as possible to recover from this. Obviously I didn’t mean to hurt them. It was just a confrontation,” Ortega told Fox 11.
“People say ugly things when they are upset.”
