00:00She appears to be browsing.
00:01She's now at a shelf.
00:03She's picked something up, which that is something that the shop,
00:07they say on all the shelves, they say pick it up, play with it, except for the bird.
00:14Kelly Clarkson's now viral interaction with a Brooklyn shopkeeper
00:17she accused of being rude to her was caught on camera.
00:21Journalist Pablo Torre obtained security footage from Art of Play in Brooklyn Heights
00:25and aired it on an episode of his podcast, Pablo Torre, finds out.
00:30In the footage, Clarkson browses the store and plays with a telescope
00:33before she comes upon Molly, the rare automaton bird at the center of the scandal.
00:39There is no audio with the footage, but she's seen talking to the shopkeeper about the toy bird
00:44as he also gestures to it.
00:46Clarkson then puts the telescope she was looking at back before heading out of the store.
00:51Before she leaves, however, she turns around and seems angry
00:54while standing at the doorway as she talks to the man at the front cash register.
00:59Art of Play co-owner Adam Rubin spoke to Page Six,
01:02blasting the singer for her reprehensible abuse of power
01:05after her public complaints allegedly unleashed a torrent of online harassment
01:09against his small business.
01:11She wanted it to go. She felt disrespected.
01:13And listen, that's fine. Everybody has a bad day.
01:15As I've been telling people all day,
01:17if it is this intense to be mentioned by Kelly Clarkson,
01:21imagine how intense it is to be Kelly Clarkson every single day.
01:25I have sympathy for her.
01:27But what?
01:28And I am...
01:29I am...
01:31I...
01:31But it's so hard to forgive her actions after she walked out of the door.
01:35Why?
01:35Because it's not having a movie.
01:37It's causing a real world...
01:38She knew what was going to happen.
01:40She knew that the entire pressure of her millions and millions of fans around the world
01:44were going to come to the service of their queen
01:46and weaponized themselves and debased themselves on behalf of a millionaire they have never met.
01:51Because she perceived a certain treatment, which wasn't a verbal...
01:54It was a perception of a mood.
01:58Nobody else in the store...
02:00The store was so crowded.
02:01Nobody else in the store would have perceived that anything negative had happened
02:06until she told off the shopkeeper as she walked out the door.
02:09And that was the only time that we realized somebody was unhappy.
02:12And then, 15 minutes later, the entire weight of the internet came crashing down upon us
02:17and we were caught completely unprepared.
02:19Like, right away?
02:2015 minutes later.
02:23I mean, I could list names.
02:25We live in Brooklyn.
02:26Look it.
02:26We're on the side of the Atlantic Avenue, right by the Brooklyn Bridge, on the edge of Brooklyn Heights.
02:31So many celebrities have come in here and many of them have posted publicly about how they love this place.
02:35So if you look at the...
02:35If you look at the, you know, social media, you can see.
02:38But that's often a thing that they talk about.
02:41I can tell you this.
02:43People way more famous than Kelly Clarkson have come in here and been treated just the same as everybody else.
02:48And they do not have a problem.
02:51Are you going to say hello?
03:10It's been so intense.
03:13It's, you know, are thousands of hateful phone calls, thousands of hateful text messages, Kelly Clarkson fans demanding we issue
03:23her an apology.
03:25And it's just such a perverse distortion of reality that anyone could look at the situation and think that we
03:30are the ones who owe an apology.
03:32Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:34Regardless of what happened in the shop, the misunderstanding in a crowded shop, everybody that comes into this store is
03:41treated the same.
03:42Like a normal person.
03:45That's what pissed her off.
03:46She didn't get special treatment.
03:47She was treated like everybody else who comes in, whether they're in sweatpants or they're nine years old or they're
03:53a celebrity we don't recognize.
03:54They all get treated the same way.
03:56And the fact that anybody thinks we owe her an apology, when she threw a Molotov cocktail into our store
04:02and while it's on fire, they're saying we owe her an apology.
04:05This is asymmetrical social warfare.
04:08We didn't know that people would come out of the woodworks that Kelly Clarkson fans would be commenting, finding our
04:14personal social media, commenting, spewing hatred on our friends, doxing our neighbors, review bombing the businesses next door.
04:21It just happened to be next door.
04:28The feud ignited this weekend when Clarkson dragged Art of Play on social media on Saturday, October 10th, accusing an
04:35employee of treating her like Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman, after allegedly assuming she couldn't afford the mechanical singing
04:41bird, which had a price tag of $15,000.
04:45The price tag now reads $15 million.
04:48That's one pricey tweet.
