What was supposed to be a dreamy getaway condo on Ocean Drive near Miami Beach, quickly morphed into an offensive exchange when the condo owner started calling a Black guest the N-word and monkey.
The condo owner harassed guest Monifah Brown through emails, voice recordings, and text messages after Brown didn’t immediately respond to the owner’s messages, the Miami New Times reports.
The slurs began after Ocean Five Condo Hotel Owner Giulia Ozyesilpinar texted Brown a question about her credit card. When Brown didn’t respond quick enough to the Booking.com host, Ozyesilpinar began making comments about her race and called her a liar.
“You acting with lies gives a very very bad picture for all of the Black people,” Ozyesilpinar said in the text, which Brown screenshot and eventually posted on Twitter. “Please try to act like a lady and be a very good representation of Black people.”
Soon, Ozyesilpinar began making wildly racist comments and calling Brown out of her name almost every time she got the chance.
In a recording obtained by Miami New Times, Ozyesilpinar can be heard making animal sounds, repeating the word monkey then asking Brown, “You want banana?”
After taking the issue to Booking.com, and asking them to take the Ocean Five Condo Hotel off of their website, Brown claims that the company didn’t take action until her friend Moesha Bennet called the company out on Twitter with screenshots of Ozyesilpinar’s racist messages.
“I’m just so shocked,” Bennet, who was supposed to make the trip to Miami with Brown, told Miami New Times. “I’ve never, ever, ever come across anything like this in my life… I don’t think I still want to go to Miami,” she said.
After social media berated the condo owner and left plenty Google reviews, Booking.com and even AirBnB removed the property listing.
Ozyesilpinar left the comment “N*GGER” under a number of the negative Google reviews that called her out for being racist.
Booking.com issued a statement trying to salvage the situation.
“We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind, and if we find that an accommodation listed on our site engages in discriminatory behaviour, we cease our working relationship and remove them from our site,” the statement read. “We are also in direct contact with the customer to see how we can best support them further with their trip.”
Read more at the Miami New Times.