The woman who made headlines after eating ice cream during the College World Series final between Tennessee and Texas A&M has slammed ESPN, accusing the network of sexualizing her and a friend on television.
During Monday night’s game, as the Volunteers defeated Texas A&M 6-5 in Game 3 to take home their first national title, ESPN cameras captured a woman known on TikTok as Annie J and a friend eating ice cream in the sweltering Omaha heat.
“It was a 20-second video of us just eating ice cream and licking it. 20 seconds of us just eating ice cream with commentary,” she said in a recent TikTok video, reacting to the attention she received after being “bashed” on TV. “We all knew where that video was going.
WARNING: Language
“And lo and behold, some creepy person on TikTok grabbed hold of it because we woke up to being compared to the girl from ‘Hawk Tua.’ No offense to her, but any girl can do that.”
The woman said she found the ESPN announcer’s commentary “weird.”
“You have to get it before it melts. It’s liquid.” One broadcaster said:He added that the temperature in Omaha at the time was 93 degrees.
“You work fast on a night like tonight,” another announcer said.
“It was 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so there was no way I was allowed to have ice cream,” she continued. “…I’d had a hot dog about 10 minutes earlier, but I made sure to eat it in front of the row of people in front of us. We were sitting right behind the dugout, so I was terrified that if even one camera caught it, something like this would happen.
“But instead, we let our guard down for literally five seconds, and the ice cream melted hilariously fast… Filming started within 15 seconds of us sitting down, because we didn’t even have time to remove the spoons from their plastic sleeves.”
In a series of TikTok videos, the woman explained that she and her friends had been subjected to inappropriate and “nasty” comments from “creepy men” on social media.
“What could be more entertaining than women eating ice cream and hot dogs and doing sexually extreme things,” she says, “but ESPN has managed to keep it vague enough that that vagueness protects them, and they’ve opened the door for all these freaky weirdos to come in and do whatever they want.
“So maybe we just do better and deliberately try not to videotape women doing this in the stands at sports games, as if I’m doing something wrong by trying to avoid heatstroke.
“… We didn’t ask to be on TV. In fact, nobody asked us to be on TV. We thought maybe the Jumbotron at most, because we knew being in the stadium might come with the land. But literally within minutes, people sitting around us had our faces on their phones and they were laughing. I can only imagine what was in that email.”
At one point, she gave the middle finger to the camera while sending a message to ESPN.
“So to ESPN,” she said, holding up her middle finger, “stop being part of this problem. Stop making sports a place where women are not safe and welcome. We don’t feel safe eating, we don’t feel safe dressing, literally everything we do is sexualized and taken completely out of context. This isn’t about what’s shown on TV. We were there the whole game. You could have shown us watching the game at any time. Pan over to us fanning ourselves, it was that hot.”
In another video, she Stop comparing The much talked about “Hawk Tua” girl’s real name is Haley Welch.
Welch gained fame on social media after a video of her saying “Hawk Tua” during a street interview went viral.
