A video authentically shows a woman who crashed her car into a tree reacting to a man telling her: “You can’t park your car here, ma’am.”
On May 31, 2023, TikTok user @olek.999 reposted an old video showing a woman warning a man passing by: “Be careful, it’s going to fly.” In the clip, he appears to be on the phone after crashing his Honda car into a tree, causing the vehicle’s engine to smoke. In response, the man jokingly says, “You can’t park your car here, ma’am.”
As he leaves, she yells, “Are you blind? What the hell? Are you some kind of malicious thug?”
As of June 6, this video upload had received nearly 35 million views.
However, this video was staged and had simply been created for entertainment purposes by TikTok user and YouTuber Phil Ferreira. He is perhaps better known as @PhilTheThrill.
The video was originally uploaded on August 24, 2022. The caption read “Karen tries to park a car. #karen #philthethrill”.
Some readers would find it hard to believe that someone believed the video was genuine and not staged. However, consider any bleary-eyed TikTok users who saw the clip once at a late hour, thought it was real, and then quickly moved on to another video.
Additionally, as of its publication date, the clip’s original upload had been viewed 37.6 million times, and this number is in addition to @olek.999’s subsequent upload and the millions of views on the account itself Ferreira’s Instagram.
Also, importantly, quite a few commenters on TikTok and Instagram seemed to believe the video was real.
In short, what is obvious to one person may not be obvious at all to others.
For any readers who need more convincing that the video was staged, we point you to this second video that appears to show the same front door of the house that can be seen in the background of the viral clip. (Also, the woman in these two videos appeared to be the same person and may be Ferreira’s mother.)
In this third video, the team behind @PhilTheThrill used a delivery truck that could be seen in the background of the viral clip, in addition to what appeared to be the Honda car that had allegedly crashed into the tree.
Also, any user who paused the viral video would have noticed that there appeared to be no damage to the front of the car and smoke was not visible under the hood. Some Reddit users pointed out several of these tips.
The viral video ended up seeming to inspire others to create similar clips, like this one from @beepbeepbubbles:
Another video, this one possibly real, showed what appeared to be a white Chevrolet Camaro that had crashed into a Murphy Express gas station sign.
“Hey, you can’t park there,” a man says in the video as he drives past the crash site. It is unclear when this clip was originally captured.
