A series of women have posted alarming TikTok reports about being randomly punched by a stranger while walking in New York, including at least two daylight attacks reported to cops this week.
Halley Kate, an influencer who has 1.1 million followers on the platform, posted a video Monday after one attack being investigated by the NYPD, saying it caused her to fall to the ground and black out.
“You guys, I was literally just walking, and a man came up and punched me in the face,” Kate said through tears in a post on Monday morning.
“Oh my god, it was so bad, I can’t even talk.”
Kate did not specify when or where the alleged incident happened. Her video recounting the ordeal appeared to be shot on 7th Avenue between West 15th and 16th streets in Chelsea.
In follow-up videos, she said she called the police and was icing a large “devil horn” bump on her head.
A woman named Mikayla Toninato, whose bio said she attends Greenwich Village’s Parsons School of Design, tagged Kate in a post six hours later, where she recounted a similar story.
“I just got punched in the face, walking home,” the TikToker claimed.
“I was literally like leaving class, I turned the corner and I was looking down and I was looking at my phone, and like texting, and then, out of nowhere, this man just came up and hit me in the face,” she said.
In an update post, Toninato said the attack happened at West 14th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
Another woman named Oliva Brand took to the platform on March 17 to report the same experience, in a clip filmed on Mulberry Street in Nolita.
“I literally got punched in the head on the sidewalk. He goes, ‘sorry,’ and then punches me — in the head,” Brand said, in a video of her walking down a street.
“Holy crap, what the hell just happened? Oh my god.”
The NYPD confirmed the narratives of Kate and Brand, saying that a 23-year-old woman reported an assault on West 16th Street and 7th Avenue at 10:20 a.m. Monday, as with Kate’s report. She was treated a medical facility for injuries to the left side of her face, cops said.
On March 17, a 25-year-old was walking her dog just before noon at Kenmare and Mulberry Streets when an “unknown individual punched her in the head,” according to officials when asked about Brand’s video.
It was unclear if the incidents were connected, police said.
The Post reached out to all three women for comment on the attacks, which appear similar to the “knockout game,” where young people encourage each other to randomly sucker punch strangers.
The recent complaints echoed the purported plight of a fourth young female TikToker, Jill Burke, who said on Feb. 8 she was attacked near Union Square and that the suspect was arrested and released on his own recognizance.
The supposed incidents came on the same day a straphanger was fatally shoved into an incoming 4 train in East Harlem by a stranger who is now charged with murder.
