A woman who went viral for eating ice cream at the College World Series championship between Tennessee and Texas A&M ripped ESPN and accused the network of sexualizing her and her friend on TV.
During Monday night’s game — when the Volunteers took home their first national title after beating Texas A&M, 6-5, in Game 3 — ESPN cameras captured the woman, who goes by Annie J on TikTok, and her friend eating ice cream while in the sweltering Omaha heat.
“It was a 20-second segment of just us eating ice cream, or licking our ice cream. Twenty seconds dedicated to, with commentary, just us eating our ice cream,” she said in a recent video on TikTok reacting to the viral attention she received after being “blasted” on TV. “We all knew what direction that video was gonna head in.
WARNING: LANGUAGE
“And lo and behold, the creeps of TikTok got a hold of it because we woke up getting compared to the ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl, which no shade to her — girl, do whatever.”
The woman said she found the commentary by the ESPN broadcasters to be “weird.”
“You gotta get it before it melts. It’s a liquid,” one of the broadcasters said, adding that it was 93 degrees in Omaha at the time.
“A night like tonight you’re working fast,” another broadcaster said.
“And it was 100 degrees, so God forbid we eat some ice cream,” she continued. “… And I had just been eating a hot dog like 10 minutes prior to that and I was making sure to eat in front of the row of people sitting in front of us — because we were sitting not far behind the dugout and I was horrified that if a single camera caught that that that this was going to happen.
“But no, instead we let our guards down for literally five seconds. The ice cream was melting comedically fast… We hadn’t even been in our seats for 15 seconds when they started filming us because I didn’t even have time to get my spoon out of the plastic sleeve that it came in.”
The woman explained in a series of TikTok videos that she and her friend were subjected to inappropriate and “repulsive” comments from “creepy men” on social media.
“What’s funnier than a woman eating an ice cream cone or eating a hot dog or something that can be overly sexualized,” she said. “But ESPN can keep it vague enough and the ambiguity is what protects them — when they just open the door for f–king creeps to come in and do whatever they want with it.
“So maybe we just do better and we don’t knowingly take videos of women in the crowds at sports games doing this s–t. As if I was doing something wrong by trying to avoid heat exhaustion.
“… I didn’t ask to be on TV. In fact nobody asked us to be on TV. We thought at most, maybe a Jumbotron because when you’re in the stadium you know that’s maybe something that could come with the territory. But within minutes, literally, we saw our faces on the phones of people sitting around us laughing about it. I can only imagine what those texts said.”
At one point, she flipped off the camera while sending a message to ESPN.
“So, to ESPN,” she said while raising her middle finger. “Stop contributing to the issue and stop making sports a place where women don’t feel safe and welcome. We can’t eat in peace, we can’t wear clothes in peace, we literally can’t do anything without it being sexualized and absolutely turned into something way out of context. It’s not the problem of being shown on TV. We were there the whole game. You could’ve shown us at any point watching the game, pan to us when we’re fanning ourselves because that’s how hot it was down there.”
In a separate video, she shut down comparisons to the viral “Hawk Tuah” girl, whose real name is Haley Welch.
Welch rose to fame on social media when a video of her saying “hawk tuah” during an interview on the street went viral.