Who Is Arlene Bunch? ‘Karen’ In Viral Racist Rant Against Indian American Family Reportedly Identified

Source: Instagram.com/ptaufiqphotography

The woman who went viral for all the wrong reasons after a video showed her exploding into a racist rant against an Indian American family, including their young children, has been identified, according to a string of unverified social media reports replete with damning receipts.

Arlene Bunch’s name was revealed by several social media accounts, including one that included previous photos showing a person who strongly resembled the woman in the viral video. Keep reading to find out what’s being reported about the woman in the video.

Perves Taufiq, a luxury wedding photographer, shared video footage on his Instagram page and described his racist encounter with the woman more than a week ago while departing an airport in Los Angeles:

Mortified we just went through this. This lady was harassing our son on the flight, unbeknownst to us , asking him if he was indian and making comments. When we landed in LA and got on the transfer bus, she told our son to “shut up” , I told her she doesn’t have a right to speak to my son that way and her husband got in my face trying to tell me to not speak to his wife. The remainder of this is what happened . I’m thankful United @united got her off the bus ultimately and a few fellow passengers stood up for us. Blown away these types of people still exist . As photographers we have seen a lot of, but this is one we could have done without .

In the video, Taufiq calls the woman “Karen,” a popular term for women who weaponize their whiteness, particularly against racial minorities and typically under the falsest of pretenses.

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A post shared by Pervez Taufiq (@ptaufiqphotography)

Taufiq’s wife commented under her husband’s post that there was “ONLY ONE Good Samaritan (the one in the video) who spoke up, but the rest of the bus was consumed by a chilling silence.”

Nicole Taufiq, also a photographer, added: “It wasn’t just the act of racism that stung; it was the apathy of the crowd, the passive acceptance that felt like silent approval. My husband and I felt incredibly alone. The silence from the majority, people who could have chosen to stand for decency, was deafening.”

While the video was shared on Nov. 24, it only began to go viral this week as outraged social media users shared the footage in hopes of finding out the name of the culprit to hold her responsible.

By Tuesday, those hopes were seemingly answered by other social media users, some of whom have an established reputation for publicly identifying other people who have found themselves in situations similar to the woman they say is named Arlene Bunch.

That includes the popular social media personality known as Tizzy, who put out a cyber APB on the woman in one of his patented video posts that placed a spotlight on the incident.

(For perspective’s sake, Tizzy has had his hand in outing other racists caught on video being racist, including a “Karen” in Utah who was racially harassing her neighbors, a white man harassing a Mexican street vendor and a white man who was shown threatening to “whip” a Black man in a grocery store in Texas.)

In response to Tizzy’s post, at least one of his nearly 600,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, identified the woman harassing the Taufiq family as Arlene Bunch, sharing a screenshot of a Google business listing as purported evidence.

Source: X screenshot

But while that post responding to Tizzy went viral, social media users sought out definitive proof of the woman’s name before accepting that single claim as fact.

That paved the way for another popular social media personality, known as That Danesh Guy, to offer some additional apparent confirmation that the woman in the video is named Arlene Bunch.

Hours after Tizzy’s post, That Danesh Guy took to Instagram and shared a video with his nearly 300,000 followers that asked in part: “This you, Arlene Bunch?” He quickly answered his own question: “I’m sorry you exploded, but being racist to children is 100% unacceptable.”

The video That Danesh Guyy shared was from a TikTok user who compiled a series of receipts that seemed to verify that the woman in the video was indeed named Arlene Bunch.

Like Tizzy, That Danesh Guy has previously exposed suspected racists’ true identities, including and notably Sarah Jane Comrie, the so-called “Citi-Bike Karen” who falsely accused a Black teen in a viral incident, and most recently Stephen Carega, who was recorded in October racially profiling and stalking a Black teen he and others falsely accused of not living in their Florida neighborhood.

The TikTok video shared by That Danesh Guy cited a GoFundMe account started last year to benefit a woman named Arlene Bunch after her home exploded from propane. On the GoFundMe page, a person named Teresa identified “Arlene Bunch” as her “sister and best friend” who was hospitalized for “burns to her face, chest and arms, she sustained several large lacerations, a punctured lung, a fractured rib, a fractured sternum, a fractured vertebra, and a shattered foot.”

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A post shared by Danesh (@thatdaneshguy)

Teresa shared several images of the explosion victim on the GoFundMe page, and each of them showed a woman who looked all but identical to the woman in the video who descended into a racist rant against the Taufiq family. That GoFundMe ended up raising nearly $30,000 for Arlene Bunch.

Arlene Bunch. | Source: GoFundMe

The incident with the Taufiq family unfolded at a time when racist acts have been on the upswing, particularly following the presidential election of Donald Trump. Those instances include racist text messages targeting Black and Latino people as well as members of the LGBTQ community across the country and racist vandalism.

This is America.

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