Five years after it happened, the Victoria’s Secret Karen video is circulating again on TikTok with 942,000 views. The account posting it didn’t film it, and its username is stamped diagonally across the middle of the frame.
@mamaafrica275 It’s been years since this happened #victoriassecret #karen #viral #video #viralvideo
The repost has 78,400 likes, 18,400 shares, and 5,181 comments.
@mamaafrica275 uploaded the clip on September 12 with the caption “It’s been years since this happened” and five tags, including #victoriassecret and #karen. It runs two minutes and 23 seconds. The account has 10,900 followers and 577 videos. TikTok credits the audio as “original sound – TiktokAuntie,” which is the repost account’s display name, on footage it did not shoot.
What actually happened in 2021
The incident took place on July 10, 2021, at the Victoria’s Secret in The Mall at Short Hills, New Jersey. Ijeoma Ukenta was shopping when Abigail Elphick stood too close to her. Ukenta asked her to keep her distance, Elphick complained to a cashier, and Ukenta started recording.
What the camera caught is the part everybody remembers: Elphick reaching for Ukenta’s phone, then sinking to the floor in tears, insisting she hadn’t tried to hit her.
Ukenta posted it in parts to her TikTok account, @iamlovekills. It moved fast, and so did the label. Elphick became “Victoria’s Secret Karen” within days.
The person who filmed it lost her account for it
Here is the part that tends to fall out of the reposts. TikTok suspended Ukenta’s account. By July 13, three days after the incident, @iamlovekills was gone.
She started a GoFundMe on July 12 to pay for a lawyer. It cleared nearly $50,000 quickly and kept climbing past $100,000. The version that survived on YouTube picked up 2.6 million views.
So the footage kept spreading while the woman who shot it was locked out of the platform she shot it for. Five years on, an account with 10,900 followers is running it with its own name over the top, and the sound is filed under its display name.
TikTok has had this argument about who owns a piece of audio before, usually when the person losing control of it has a record label behind them.
It is still in court, and the filings complicate the meme
The case did not end when the views did.
In July 2023, Ukenta filed a civil suit against Elphick, Victoria’s Secret, the mall, and its security company, arguing they were grossly negligent, slow to respond, and treated her as the antagonist rather than as someone a fellow shopper had tried to assault. Her lawyers have said she filmed for her own protection, “keenly aware that if the police were called, she, a Black woman, may not be believed.”
Elphick’s side filed a counterclaim over privacy. Her lawyers told the court she has a long history of medical and psychological conditions and lives in a complex reserved for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and that what the video captured was a person who believed the recording was about to cost her her job and her housing.
No criminal charges were filed against either woman.
None of that fits in a repost caption. “It’s been years since this happened” is the whole context @mamaafrica275 offers, and the 5,181 comments underneath are working from a two-minute clip and a nickname.
The clip outlived the story
This is what the repost economy does to a news event. The footage is durable and travels forever. The reporting, the lawsuits, the disability filings, the account suspension, none of it is attached to the file.
A video from 2021 can surface in 2026 in front of a million people who have no idea there was ever a second act, watermarked by someone who wasn’t in the store.
For more on how the internet remembers things, follow our Trending section.
