Disney workers get spit on, yelled at and pushed trying to enforce COVID safety rules
ORLANDO, Fla. — A security guard reminded a guest to put on his mask before he walked into Disney World’s Contemporary Resort near the Magic Kingdom last month.
“I’m a guest,” argued the middle-aged, fedorawearing man. He asked to be left alone.
Then he spat, and some of his saliva hit the guard’s forehead.
It was one of several confrontations on Disney property in recent weeks as some guests have angrily refused to follow Disney’s pandemic safety rules. Some of the situations have led to arrests, although not in the case of the spitting man, who hurried inside the hotel and disappeared in the elevators before he could be identified on Feb. 5.
At Disney World, visitors are required to have their temperatures checked and they must wear masks at the four theme parks, hotels and Disney Springs. Many have praised Disney for putting strict rules in place and devoting employees to enforce them during the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 31,000 Floridians.
But Orange County Sheriff’s reports released to the Orlando Sentinel also depict the challenges theme parks and their employees face enforcing the rules. Not everyone is willing to obey them. Some visitors spit. They yell. They push Disney employees out of their way. They are drunkenly defiant.
“There’s never a day when I don’t have a story,” said one employee whose regular job was upended during the pandemic so she took a new assignment enforcing mask rules in the Disney Springs parking garages. “I cried the first week I started. It was not a good time at all. Imagine going to work every single day where people ridicule you.”
People get angry because they can’t wear a gaiter mask or don’t understand why Disney has mask requirements when the state of Florida does not, the employee said. She asked not to be identified over concerns about losing her job.
“I’ve had a guest literally get right up in my face and literally curse me out,” she said.
She was scared she was going to get punched if her supervisor hadn’t been there, she said.
“If I honestly didn’t have good coworkers, I would have already quit by now,” she said.
Disney spokeswoman Andrea Finger said most of the visitors who returned to the parks since the pandemic reopening are supportive of the safety rules.
“Millions of guests visit our theme parks each year, and in rare instances when things of this nature occur, we hold them accountable,” Finger said in a statement.
Theme park-goers don’t want to be told what to do in a society where “we’re more prone to think about ourselves than about the welfare of those around us,” said Gregory Webster, a psychology professor at the University of Florida.
“They’re thinking about it in terms of having their free will repressed instead of making a very small and trivial sacrifice for the betterment of the whole,” Webster said of the COVID-19 rule violators.
The mistreatment of Disney employees is a problem that runs deeper in the service and retail industry, Webster said.
Last Tuesday, Hyatt officials complained that attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference acted with “hostility” when hotel staff urged them to wear masks and socially distance during the event last month in Orlando. Maskless melees Disney’s Reedy Creek firefighters were helping a drunken woman who had hurt her ankle onto a gurney in the lobby of the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel on Feb. 12, a sheriff’s report said.
The woman’s husband, Stephen Johnson, also seemed drunk and began yelling in a firefighter’s face, apparently upset his wife was being taken away, the report said. He wasn’t wearing a mask.
“I do not have a mask, buddy!” Johnson screamed, growing more irate when the firefighter asked him to step back and then cover up, according to the report.
Johnson threatened to kill a sheriff’s deputy, tussled with the officer and then grabbed an Orange County Sheriff deputy’s gun from his belt, the report said.
Johnson, 32, of Fernandina Beach, Fla., was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer, assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting an officer with violence and disorderly intoxication. He has pleaded not guilty, according to court records.
Reedy Creek Improvement District spokeswoman Eryka Washington declined to comment on the incident.
Allen Beltran was charged with disorderly intoxication and resisting an officer without violence after he kept pulling off his mask and moving close to other people in line at a Disney Springs’ Starbucks Jan. 5, according to court records. He pleaded not guilty.