Woman ejected from Sesame Place after alleged racist comments to Muslim woman

A woman was ejected from Sesame Place on Tuesday after a curse-filled tirade directed at a Muslim woman, who captured the incident on camera and alleges it all began when the other woman told her to “go back” where she came from.

The video, which was gaining attention on Instagram and Twitter, begins with the unidentified white older woman in a black bathing suit giving the middle finger to the camera in front of scores of confused kids waiting in line for a water ride at the amusement park in Langhorne, Bucks County.

The woman behind the camera, who identified herself to CBS3 as Zafirah Moore, urges the other woman to “Say it again! Say it again!”

“Acting like this around all these kids. This is terrible. This is horrible. This is horrible,” Moore says on the video. “She told me to ‘Go back to where I came from.’ Wow. At Sesame Place!”

As the woman begins to scream curse word after curse word at Moore and demands she not take pictures of her, Moore remains calm.

“This is weird. This is weird,” she says of the woman’s rage. “She’s got babies crying. It’s terrible.”

At one point, the woman grabs the phone as Moore is recording in an apparent effort to stop her.

“Who is she to take pictures of me?” the woman says.

“Who are you to tell me to go back to where I came from?” Moore asks.

The phrase has been at the center of ongoing racial tensions since President Donald Trump tweeted out a similar phrase in July, directed at Democratic congresswomen of color.

Moore did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Inquirer. In an interview with CBS3, she said she was born and raised in West Philadelphia. She told the station she was at Sesame Place in her hijab with her children when she asked the woman in front of her to stop cursing. That’s when Moore alleges the woman told her to “go back” to where she came from.

“She probably just assumed because I’m Muslim and I had my garbs on that, you know, I was from somewhere else, I guess,” Moore told CBS3.

Though she did not capture the white woman saying that phrase to her on camera, the woman does not deny saying it when Moore confronts her about it in the video.

In an emailed statement, a Sesame Place spokesperson said the park “does not tolerate this type of behavior,” and the woman seen on the video was “promptly removed from the park and will not be permitted to return.”

“Our team deeply regrets that any park guest would have this experience in our park. It runs counter to everything we stand for,” the statement, sent in all italics, read. “To be clear, the woman depicted in that video was not given tickets to return to the park.”

Sesame Place did not respond to a subsequent request for information about the woman’s identity.

On Wednesday, Moore was interviewed by officers with the Middletown Township Police Department, which covers Sesame Place.

Lt. Steve Forman said his department was not called to Sesame Place on Tuesday, and only found out about the incident after the fact. “I don’t think they realized the totality of it at that time,” he said.

Police have not yet identified the woman in the video, but Forman urged her to come forward.

“We would like to hear from the other party involved to get both sides of it, and if anyone else has any other videos of the incident, we would appreciate that being forwarded to us,” he said.

Once the other woman is identified and interviewed, the case will be reviewed by police and the Bucks County district attorney’s office, Forman said.