Tech

After New Yorker's racist rant goes viral, his law firm gets pummeled with 1-star Yelp reviews

Key Points
  • Schlossberg was captured yelling at a restaurant's employees because they were speaking Spanish to customers.
  • Yelp told reviewers that it would be cleaning up Schlossberg's page after a deluge of posts from people responding to the news.
A New Yorker's racist rant goes viral and his law firm gets pummeled with 1-star Yelp reviews
VIDEO1:0301:03
Angry Yelp users pummel the firm of a lawyer behind a viral racist video

Aaron Schlossberg, a New York-based lawyer, became internet famous on Wednesday for the worst of reasons: a racist rant that went viral.

Schlossberg was captured on a smartphone video yelling at employees in the restaurant Fresh Kitchen in midtown Manhattan. His complaint was that the workers were speaking Spanish to customers.

"And my guess is they're not documented," Schlossberg said to an employee, who appeared to be a manager. "So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country."

ICE is the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for enforcing federal laws on border control.

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Beyond just facing the wrath of Twitter, Schlossberg's business is getting pummeled online.

His firm, the Law Office of Aaron M. Schlossberg, has been flooded with one-star reviews on Yelp, with commenters calling him a "vile racist" and surfacing other incidents of disparaging remarks he's made in public toward minority groups.

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Yelp earnings miss, revenues beat

So many reviews were flooding Schlossberg's page that Yelp jumped in to say the listing is undergoing an "active cleanup alert." According to Yelp, when a business attracts posts because it "made waves in the news," the company works to "remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer's personal consumer experience with the business."

Schlossberg's website says the firm handles business and commercial law in New York.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Schlossberg donated $500 to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who promised to crack down on immigration and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

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New York lawyer whose racist rant went viral doesn't deserve a comeback, says 'Shark Tank' star Kevin O'Leary