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An Airbnb host has been banned from the home-sharing platform after she was filmed using racially offensive language while speaking to a group of black guests, Airbnb has confirmed to Fox News.
The incident took place early on Saturday morning, hours after Airbnb user Meshawn Cisero and his friends arrived at the host’s New York City property. As seen in footage later shared by Cicero’s friend Kenneth Simpson, the host, identified only as Kate, can be seen confronting the men after asking them to leave and calling them criminals a short while before.
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She can also be seen threatening to call the police, and claiming that she hadn’t allowed the five people to stay at her home, but rather four.
When the men protest, and say she offered sleeping for four, with a fifth on a couch, she responds by saying, “Which monkey is gonna stay on the couch?”
Warning: Videos contain offensive language.
“I felt like she should’ve related to us to a degree,” Cisero told The Root, alluding to the fact that both he and the host are minorities. “But that feeling was quickly removed.”
Simpson too told The Washington Post he felt “dehumanized” by the whole experience, as he and his friends are all “educated, working professionals.”
“And it doesn’t even matter if you’re an educated person, because no one deserves to be called a monkey and be dehumanized for no reason,” he added.
Cisero admitted that the host’s boyfriend had previously asked the group to keep the noise down, before the host came upstairs to kick them out, though he was polite the entire time.
“He never got rude, loud, or aggressive; he was trying to remedy the situation,” Cisero said. “Honestly, we were being very compliant.”
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On social media, Simpson confirmed the group later found other accommodations, reportedly after police arrived and said they could not force the host to keep them on as guests, even if she was in the wrong, the Root reported.
Airbnb said in a tweet that it had helped the group find alternate accommodations in the city.
The company further condemned the host’s language as “unacceptable” in a statement obtained by Fox News.
“The language used in this video is unacceptable and has no place in the Airbnb community,” Airbnb’s statement reads. “We have a strict nondiscrimination policy, which we are enforcing to remove the host from our platform.
“We are supporting Mr. Cisero and his friends, and we're thankful to them for bringing this to our attention so that we could take action.”
Airbnb also enforces a community commitment policy, under which guests and hosts agree to treat all users with respect, and without judgment.
Simpson added that he shared the video to social media in the hopes that others re-post it, to bring attention to, and prevent, incidents like this from happening in the future.
“Our hope is that someone else doesn’t have to encounter a racist Airbnb [host] like Kate,” he wrote on Instagram.
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According to the Washington Post, a man claiming to be the host’s boyfriend later said on Reddit that the group was being “belligerent and refused to leave” — while acknowledging that the woman called the men “monkeys” — though his comments have since been removed from Reddit.
He had also claimed that allegations of harassment “all night” on the part of the hosts was “simply not true.”
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