NEW YORK CITY — Ariel Roman made headlines this month when she was dubbed an “angry ex-hostess” who threw poop into the koi pond of her former employer, the swanky TAO Downtown Restaurant in Chelsea.
Her response to the buzz? “Me Too: This is what happens when you’re a woman and you speak up about sexual harassment in the workplace,” she said in a video posted to TikTok last week.
Roman, 24, a Manhattan resident and former hostess at TAO-managed Moxy East Village, says the poop throw was a last-ditch plea to call attention to her nightlife whistleblowing. To her, the stunt was her response to years of company retaliation against her attempting to report an abusive relationship with a TAO nightclub promoter and raising flags about promoters allegedly spiking the drinks of — and sexually harassing — young female clientele.
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“They never banned him or anything, they keep letting him do what he’s doing to girls,” Roman said of her promoter ex-boyfriend in the TikTok video.
Why did Roman land on pitching poop into a koi pond as her attention-grabbing action?
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“I’ve been trying everything for a year,” Roman told Patch. “All press is good press and I knew what would get a headline.”
TAO Hospitality Group declined to provide comment to Patch, citing the sensitive matter of the case.
A source familiar with the matter told Patch that Roman’s claims were investigated at the venue level, but yielded no evidence to corroborate Roman’s allegations.
The drama ensued when Roman stopped showing up to work in December 2022 after she discovered her promoter boyfriend, an independent contractor at TAO, had reportedly cheated on her and impregnated two women, she said. Roman was fired for violating the company’s no-show policy, she claims.
In a lawsuit filed this month, TAO alleges Roman subsequently threatened to burn down multiple venues, physically assaulted female employees and stalked various promoters working in TAO venues, as well as shout allegations made against the company outside TAO-owned venues in Manhattan.
Roman claims that she is simply calling attention to bad behavior from promoters, and is being retaliated against by the restaurant group for reporting her “extremely abusive” ex-boyfriend, who sexually assaulted her and reportedly threatened to strangle her cat, she said.
Roman contends that she was, in one instance, jumped by him and his friends; in another, he had a restraining order filed against her that she didn’t know about, she said.
She was later arrested when she was found to be in violation of it, though her charges were later dropped, she said.
The situation escalated when Roman was arrested in June 2023 after she allegedly called her ex and threatened to set him on fire; but she says she was with several other TAO employees at a pool club at the time of the incident, and contends a TAO employee used a burner phone to frame her.
She also claims TAO managers threatened employees’ jobs if they were to testify against TAO in court, and that she has received threats from dozens of online accounts since the incident (several of those accounts claim to represent Tao Group Hospitality, she said).
Roman says the months of theatrics has spun her sexual harassment and drink spiking whistleblowing in order to discredit her claims.
“That’s the main thing that this was about, that’s what I was trying to go to the police about, that’s what he [the ex-boyfriend] and TAO Group were trying to conspire against me, to get ahead of that,” Roman said in a TikTok video, “to make sure that the police didn’t believe anything that I had to say … and make everybody think that I was insane.”
Roman says she is looking into suing TAO for defamation and the swanky entertainment group caused her to get fired from two jobs due to time spent fighting TAO in court.
The ex-hostess is due back in court on July 8 in the koi pond poop throw case.
“It may make me look crazy,” Roman said of the feces fling, “but they’ve been saying that for a year when I wasn’t doing anything, so I may as well give them what they want and have fun with it.”
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