Dash & Lily actor Midori Francis says she was spat on in a racist attack this week, the Hollywood Reporter reports. Francis, who is of Japanese descent, was targeted while walking in Los Angeles with a friend. In a series of tweets from Thursday that has since been deleted, Francis said she was spat on by a person driving by in a car.
“I’m a[n] Asian woman. I was spat on directly by a passenger in a black car which slowed down and intentionally spat out the window at me. I was close enough to the car to know it was Intentional,” shared with her followers.
Francis explained that the incident happened the afternoon of March 31 “around 2:37pm PST” and took place on the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Fern Dell Drive. At the time of the attack, Francis was with one friend, but “was shocked and didn’t get plate number.” She asked her followers for help to report the crime the “proper place.”
While Francis said she tried calling the Los Angeles Police, she was directed to the non-emergency number, but was unable to get through and didn’t see any options for reporting hate crimes online. She followed up her tweet with an update, telling followers she reported the incident to both stopaapihate.org and standagainsthatred.org, but “was relieved and then sad to see there was a whole category for being spat on.”
Francis’ tweets come after an alarming spike in anti-Asian violence in the past year, which was recently magnified by the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings, in which eight people were killed, including six Asian women. Multiple Asian celebrities have spoken up to share their own experiences with racism, including Daniel Dae Kim, Olivia Munn, and Sandra Oh.
In an interview with ABC News in early March, Kim spoke about his efforts to raise awareness of racist attacks in order to stop them. “I got very angry because this is now a year of these kinds of things going on,” Kim told Juju Chang last month. “They’re attacking our most-vulnerable population and no one in the mainstream media, outside of the Asian American echo chamber, is picking up this story. … People are saying for the first time, ‘I had no idea this was going on,’ and that means to me that we’re making progress in shining a light on the problem.”