Erica Thomas, a Georgia state representative who said she was told to “go back where you came from” at a supermarket near Atlanta over the weekend on Saturday confronted the man who she says harassed her, the Daily Mail reports.
'If you know how you made me feel yesterday,” Thomas started to say to Eric Sparkes as the WSB-TV's cameras rolled.
“Back off,” Sparkes retorted.
Sparkes then accused Thomas of lying.
'Me telling you to "Go back where you came from." Did I say that?' Sparkes interrupted when Thomas asked whether he felt bad about what he said. 'Is it on video?' Sparkes asked.
Thomas then asked what Sparkes said, to which he responded: “I called you a lazy (expletive). That’s the worst thing I said.”
Thomas, who is nine months pregnant, in a social media post Friday said Sparkes cursed at her in front of her young daughter at a Publix supermarket and told her to “go back” to where she came from because he thought she had too many items in the express checkout line at a grocery store.
"He said, 'I don't care. You're a lazy son of a b----. You need to get the f--- out of here. Go back where you came from,'" Thomas told her Facebook followers.
"It hurt me so bad because everything in me just wanted to tell him who I am. But I couldn't get anything out," she said.
She said the man "kept going on and on" until an employee intervened and asked him to leave.
Sparkes denied making any racially-charged remarks.
“This woman, Ms. Thomas, is playing the victim for political purposes because she is a state legislator,” he told WSB. “I’m a Democrat and will vote Democrat for the rest of my life, so call me whatever you want to believe. For her political purposes, make it black, white, brown, whatever. It’s untrue.”
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