The day Dawntanya Smith became an internet sensation started as a normal day.
Then came the Kirkwood Karen.
Smith supervises a post office in Kirkwood. One day in August, a middle-aged female customer approached her window and asked if Smith could help her obtain her mail from a PO box at another post office. The woman asked Smith to call the other post office and have them give her the key — something Smith couldn’t do.
At first, Smith says the customer was nice and cordial. She didn’t raise a fuss when Smith declined her request, but she did say something negative about herself, Smith recalls, which signaled to Smith that something wasn’t all quite right.
A postal worker for 10 years, Smith says she always tries to be nice to people. “I like people, and people can have bad days.” So she walked the woman out of the post office and told her everything would be OK, that “the sun is going to shine.”
“The only thing I’m registering is, ‘Let me help her, let me get her outside,’” Smith says. “Just, ‘Have a great day. It’s going to be OK.’ You know, positive things.”
They left on good terms, Smith says. Then, about five minutes later, the customer returned in a completely different mood.
“It was a totally different situation,” Smith says.
What happened next would be seen by far more people than the handful at the Kirkwood Post Office that day. The woman returned to the post office in a fit of rage — and Smith ended up capturing her tirade in a video that’s since been viewed on social media more than a million times.
The video shows the customer screaming at Smith, a Black woman, saying, “You’re not equal!” She later whipped out her phone to record her own video, and said, “I send it to Trump. Maybe he could do something. And then Obama could sue him.”
The woman walked from her car to the post office’s entrance multiple times during her minutes-long outburst. Once, to viewers’ confusion, she asked Smith where she got her hair done, saying she hadn’t had hers done in five years.
Toward the end of the video, the customer finally left the lot, only to return again. "I tell ya, I've had it," she yells. "Goddamn, you have ruined my life. I sit here. All I want is my mail. My mail!"
The internet immediately pounced on the video, and the woman’s nonsensical arguing made her an easy target. From an outsider’s view, her outburst fit her into the stereotype of a “Karen,” a middle-class white woman who rages against those she perceives as beneath her.
But the customer’s problems run deeper than the “Karen” moniker would suggest. Days after the incident at the post office, court records show, the woman was charged with assault and unlawful use of a weapon for a different incident in which she threatened someone with a knife.
Court records also show a litany of financial troubles. Landlords who have rented to the St. Louis County woman, and sued her for rent, detail a pattern of bizarre behavior and hostility. One landlord, who asked us not to use his name, fearing retaliation, says he lost nearly $7,000 when the woman refused to pay rent and beat holes into her apartment’s walls and floors the day before her eviction. Another landlord says the woman called the police more than 40 times during the year she rented from him.
Ruth Broome, who briefly rented to the woman in 2017, says the woman once called the police on her for supposedly trying to steal her reading glasses.
“She can appear perfectly normal, but then she can start crying to please not send her to Afghanistan,” Broome says. “She’ll go to Iraq, but not Afghanistan. Just rambling about things that make no sense at all.
“She told me my son was an asshole. I don’t have any sons.”
RFT has attempted to reach the woman several times over the past week but has never heard back.
Whether the woman suffers from mental health problems or not, Smith says, some things are “rooted in people” and it takes the right moment for those feelings to bubble out.
“It’s almost as if this woman had been waiting to say this,” Smith says. “And once she started, everything she had been thinking just came out.”
Smith initially reacted to the interaction with humor. She showed the video she recorded to her coworkers laughing, saying, “Look at this lady” and “she was bugging out today.” It took time and people asking her if she was OK for the reality of what she experienced to set in.
“Oftentimes, as Black women, we have to push things aside just to keep going,” Smith says.
She has dealt with a lot of rough customers in her 10 years at the post office. She’s even been called the n-word while carrying mail in Kirkwood. But her interaction with the woman was far more extreme than any other racist altercation she’s experienced.
Yet Smith is barely heard during the video. She only breaks her silence a few times to say “that’s not nice” or “please step off of our lot.” It was her instinct to stay calm, Smith says. But she's glad she recorded the tirade.
“I’m working in an area where, if I didn’t record it, I would have been the villain and she would have been the victim,” Smith says.
Strangers started calling the post office apologizing for the woman’s behavior and sending Smith flowers after the incident went viral. She’s since “blocked out” most of it and is still processing much of what happened.
Even so, she feels like her brush with online fame has taught her something important.
“I think I’m going to be OK,” Smith says. “Nothing enlightens me more to know that I can go high when somebody goes low.”
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