Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the cops on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park and falsely claimed he was threatening her life, is still not done playing the victim.
In an op-ed published by Newsweek on Tuesday, more than three years after the incident, Cooper placed the blame on birdwatcher Christian Cooper for instigating the viral incident, and raised a host of reasons to justify her behavior, from pandemic anxieties, to childhood sexual assault, to poor phone reception.
“As Christian’s video went viral, my life, as I knew it, was over,” she wrote.
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Cooper (no relation to Christian) argued in her op-ed that “anxieties” were running high due to the COVID pandemic when she accidentally took her dog—“whom my life revolved around”—into the Ramble, a protected nature preserve in Central Park that is popular with bird watchers. She claimed Christian scared her when she heard his voice “boom,” telling her she shouldn’t be there with an unleashed dog.
As Christian has also acknowledged, when Cooper refused to leash her dog, he held out a dog treat and said, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.”
“I was a female, alone in a secluded area of Central Park, with a man yelling at me and threatening me,” Cooper wrote Tuesday. “As a victim of a sexual assault in my late teens, I was completely panicked for my safety and wellbeing.”
She claimed Christian “bizarrely” offered her dog a treat, which raised a “red flag” with her due to news stories about dog poisonings. (Christian previously said he kept treats on him while birdwatching as a way of getting dog owners to leash their dogs.)
As the subsequent viral video showed, she called 911 to repeatedly claim that an “African-American man” was “threatening myself and my dog.” (Her repeated description of his skin color was due to poor phone reception, she argued.) In a call-back from a dispatcher, she also falsely accused Christian of assault.
“There were never any racial implications to my words. I just felt raw fear, and desperately wanted help,” she wrote.
Cooper was fired from her job with an investment firm in the wake of the May 2020 encounter and charged with filing a false police report. She was allowed to complete five therapy sessions on racial bias in exchange for having the charge dropped.
For his part, Christian previously said he was “uncomfortable” with the level of public backlash against Cooper.
Nevertheless, Cooper claimed in her piece that Christian had threatened other dog owners in the past but they were too scared to speak out lest they be “canceled—as I have been.”
She wrote that she had been living “in hiding” for three years, without a job “that meets my qualifications.” She even appeared to blame Christian for leaving domestic violence survivors in harm’s way because she was forced to flee her New York City apartment, which had been used as a safe haven for “numerous women who had endured abusive relationships.”
Unrepentant, she wrote, “I only reported exactly what happened to me that day when I was threatened by a man with a history of aggressive behavior towards other dog owners in a remote, isolated area of Central Park. I was terrified and traumatized.”
After all that, she wrote that she had tried to contact Christian for an “honest, productive conversation” but, for reasons she doesn’t seem to grasp, he hadn’t responded.
