Beating of Chrissy Lee Polis

The incident

On April 18, 2011, just before 8 p.m., two teenage girls attacked a transgender woman inside a McDonald's in Rosedale, Maryland, near the Golden Ring Mall. The victim, 22-year-old Chrissy Lee Polis, lived in Baltimore. She said she was heading to the restroom when one of the girls spat in her face, and then both girls began beating her. One attacker was 14 years old.

McDonald's employee Vernon Hackett recorded the assault on video, which also showed another employee and a customer trying to stop the attack. Other workers can be heard laughing in the footage. Hackett was fired on April 23 after posting transphobic comments about Polis on Facebook. The beating went on for several minutes.

According to a CBS Baltimore report, after a hard hit to the head, Polis appeared to have a violent seizure and was bleeding from the mouth, while onlookers told the attackers to leave before police arrived. Polis later said she was intoxicated at the time and did have a seizure. She suffered cuts to her face and mouth. Polis believed the assault happened because she was transgender.

The video

A three-minute recording of the assault spread online and gained significant traction. It initially appeared on YouTube before being removed, then resurfaced on sites like WorldStar HipHop. By the evening of April 22, 2012, one platform had logged over half a million views. The Drudge Report prominently featured the video for most of that day. Much of the widespread interest stemmed from the racial makeup of those involved: the perpetrators were Black, and the victim was White. In response, McDonald’s released a statement confirming they had terminated the employee who filmed the incident.

Criminal charges and sentences

Following the assault, Equality Maryland, a group advocating for transgender rights, urged local officials to look into whether the incident should be classified as a hate crime. State attorney Scott D. Shellenberger noted that such charges could be filed, though he was not yet aware of the victim's gender identity. In the juvenile system, a 14-year-old admitted responsibility on July 1, 2011. The other attacker, 19-year-old Teonna Monae Brown, entered a guilty plea in Baltimore County Circuit Court on August 4, 2011, for first-degree assault and a hate crime. Prosecutors requested a 10-year sentence with 5 years suspended, while the maximum possible penalty was 35 years. The court imposed the sentence prosecutors had sought. Some transgender advocates felt the punishment was too lenient.

Aftermath

The video's release exposed how vulnerable and unprotected transgender people were in Baltimore. A large protest involving hundreds of people took place the week after the attack. Transgender advocacy groups aimed to use the event to draw attention to violence targeting their community. Just before the assault, a Maryland bill that would have included transgender protections had failed in the legislature; the version that ultimately passed lacked those safeguards. By November 2011, a new bill offering protections for transgender individuals was being introduced in Howard County's government. That county officially enacted these protections into local law on December 5, 2011.