A 22-year-old Californian woman who wrongly accused a black teenager of stealing her phone and approached him at a New York hotel in a widely viewed video was charged after returning to the city on Saturday.
Miya Ponsetto was charged with attempted theft, major theft, insulting behavior to a child and two counts of attempted assault, according to city police. NYPD detectives flew to California on Thursday with an arrest warrant from the Piru resident.
Ponsetto’s confrontation with 14-year-old Keyon Harrold Jr on December 26 at the Hotel Arlo in Manhattan was recorded and posted online by the boy’s father, jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold.
The video shows an agitated woman demanding the teenager’s phone, claiming he stole it. The phone was found shortly after, in an Uber.
Security video released by the police shows Ponsetto frantically grabbing the teenager while trying to escape from the hotel door.
The charges follow more than a week of intense media coverage and demands from the teenager’s family and activists for her to face criminal charges.
Ponsetto apologized, but defended himself in a television interview conducted before she was arrested in California.
“I don’t feel that this is who I am as a person. I don’t feel that one single mistake defines me, ”she told CBS. “But I sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, apologize if I made the son feel as if he had attacked him or if I hurt his feelings or the father’s feelings.”
In her complaint on Saturday, the judge gave Ponsetto supervised freedom and issued protective orders in favor of the victims, prosecutors said.
Defense lawyer Paul D’Emilia said Ponsetto was innocent of the charges and that the case “will be resolved in our courts and not on social media.”
“We are intrigued and disappointed that, at this time of increased tensions in our country, the authorities have chosen to aggravate the situation by unnecessarily transporting NYPD members across the country, in Covid’s teeth, to bring back a person who would have returned with a simple order by phone, ”said D’Emilia by email.