CEO caught on video confronting neighbor over Black Lives Matter message

A Bay Area-based cosmetics CEO is the latest executive to face public backlash after a viral video showed her harassing a neighbor of color.

Lisa Alexander, the CEO of a cosmetics brand apologized late Sunday after a viral video showed her berating a neighbor in San Francisco after assuming him to be trespassing.

Alexander, along with her husband, could be seen threatening to call police on James Juanillo, who is Filipino, as he stenciled “Black Lives Matter” with chalk in front of his own home.

“There are not enough words to describe how truly sorry I am for being disrespectful last Tuesday when I made the decision to question him about what he was doing in front of his home,“ Alexander said in a statement. “I should have minded my own business.”

In the video, which was first shared on Tuesday and had since been retweeted nearly 200,000 times, the couple asks him whether Juanillo lives in the house before asserting that they know he doesn’t and is breaking the law.

Juanillo doesn’t answer the couple, but invites them to call the police. The couple then walk away, with Alexander responding: “Yes, we will do so.” He added that Alexander “lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here”.

The video stops short of showing what happens next. Juanillo summed up the encounter on Twitter: “A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stenciling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall.”

Juanillo said a police officer pulled up several minutes after the encounter and drove away after recognizing Juanillo as a longtime resident. He later told KGO-TV he believes the couple accused him of defacing private property because they didn’t think he belonged in the wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood.

The backlash sparked accusations of racism and led a cosmetics distributor to cut ties with Alexander, who serves as CEO of the LaFace Skincare line. Birchbox, a subscription-based, beauty distributor, responded to the social media furor over the video by condemning her “racist actions” on Saturday and announcing it had cut ties with the company.

“We have not worked with LaFace for several years,” the company tweeted. “We’ve removed their products from our website & will not be working with them in the future.”

Alexander’s actions even had an unintended impact on an unrelated cosmetics brand. Ivan and Mellisa Milos, co-owners of My LaFace cosmetic located more than 300 miles away in Los Angeles, reported targeted harassment and a rush of negative reviews following the viral video.

“We don’t know her. We viewed the video many times and she made a big mistake,” Melissa Milos told KGO-TV. “We started private messaging them to say ‘I’m not Lisa, I’m not LaFace Products. My business is in LA,’ and then we got some people writing back saying ‘we are sorry and will delete it now,’ but some have not.”

Alexander is the latest in a growing trend of white Americans appearing on a widely shared video accosting a person of color, despite the subsequent consequences usually resulting in a public shaming or a loss of employment.

In May, New Yorker Amy Cooper was fired from her job and temporarily stripped of her rescue dog after calling the police on a black birdwatcher who asked her to leash the animal. In the viral video she is seen threatening “to tell [police] there’s an African American man threatening my life”.

The New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, announced sweeping policing reform, including measures that criminalize race-based calls to police in response.

And just days after the killing of a 46-year-old black man named George Floyd by a white, Minneapolis police officer, a white venture capitalist named Tom Austin was filmed threatening to call the police on black tenants of an office building who he assumed didn’t belong. Austin’s entire board of directors resigned and the office lease was voided as a result.

“White folk must fear that calling the police frivolously will result in their name being printed in the media and forever associated with the social stigma of calling the cops to harass black people,” The Undefeated’s Brandon Starkey wrote in 2018 after another Oakland woman made headlines for calling the police on black barbecuers.

Alexander, meanwhile, said she was committed to learn from the experience and wants to apologize to Juanillo in person. “When I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did,” the statement continued.

Juanillo said on Sunday that he would be open to talking with Alexander. He said in the last several days neighbors have left flowers and notes expressing support, with many adding chalk art to the retaining wall and sidewalk.

“For me this experience has left me feeling vindicated and validated. I imagine that she regrets those couple of minutes,“ he said. “Do I believe that her life should be destroyed over this? No. I just hope that she realizes that what she did was racist and she can improve from this incident.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report