Tara Palmeri Punched in Face Breaking Up Fight Outside NYC Lululemon: ‘Just Felt Like I Had to Do Something’

Screenshot via Tara Palmeri on Substack.

Independent investigative reporter Tara Palmeri has made a name for herself over the past few years with her sharp journalism and dishy podcasts, but found herself in the middle of a local crime story after she instinctively rushed to break up a fight on a New York City sidewalk on Friday.

Palmeri first shared the incident in a video she tweeted that showed a group of young people — she told Mediaite she was not sure if they were minors or young adults — swarming around a security guard at a Lululemon store and attacking him.

“I just witnessed this in front of a lululemon on 14th Street,” she wrote. “I tried to stop them, a girl punched me in the face for trying to break it up.”

She added that she had called the police and commented, “This is disgusting.”

In subsequent tweets, Palmeri replied to concerned followers to say that she was “not a hero” and was “just sad that no one else did anything.”

“[I]t’s not about me, I’m lucky that I didn’t get seriously hurt,” she wrote, “it was about that man that they were basically willing to kill over athleisure.”

Palmeri later posted a longer clip on her YouTube page.

“I Tried to break up a Fight Outside of LuluLemon in downtown NYC & Got Punched in the face,” the video is titled, adding an all-important “I’m okay.”

She narrated the beginning of the video, again saying this was “extremely disturbing” and describing how she “was literally just punched in the face while trying to break up a fight — these kids, they attacked a security guard outside of a Lululemon store, in downtown New York.”

“It was horrible,” she said, and the video goes to show the fight, with about half a dozen people surrounding the security guard as she calls out “Stop it!” to the attackers and “call 911!” to bystanders.

Mediaite reached out to Palmeri after seeing her social media posts — confirming, thankfully, yes, she is okay — and talked to her over the phone about the ordeal.

Palmeri told Mediaite how she was just “walking down the street” to do some shopping, when she passed by Lululemon and “saw what looked like a security officer basically being dragged out of the store, or maybe he was trying to get these kids out of this store.”

She characterized it as “a really aggressive scene” with the young people “attacking” the security officer, who was “just swarmed” by his attackers. She wasn’t sure what set off the incident but did witness the group dragging him out of the store’s entrance.

“I was just really worried about his life,” she explained her decision to intervene in a fight where she was outnumbered. “I jumped in there and I tried to stop it,” and was trying to call the police and yell for others to call 911, and “I tried to get in there and this woman lunged at me because she saw me with my phone.”

The fight had become “an outer ring that was protecting the inner ring of five or six guys, maybe seven guys on one person,” Palmeri continued, and the security guard “was being pummeled in the stomach, just being punched in the face, he was being slammed up against a wall.”

“It was just so unfair, the number of people against one person — over athleisure!” she commented. “I mean, it was just — what could they possibly be getting from Lululemon that would be worth that? And it just made me really sad.”

There were not many other people around, Palmeri said, and they seemed reluctant to get involved, which she said she understood because it was a dangerous situation.

“There weren’t really a lot of people on the street doing anything,” she said. “Maybe they were in shock. But again, it was a risky situation. I probably should have thought twice before I got involved because they could have had knives, guns, you never know. But, I don’t know, I just felt like I had to do something about it.”

After she was able to connect with the police over the phone, she took “as much footage as I could from a safe distance so that I could give the police something” to help with any investigation, adding that she felt it “was a very coordinated attack.”

Palmeri was able to speak to the security guard afterwards, and told Mediaite that “he said he seemed like he was okay” but was “very shook up,” and may not have had severe visible injuries but she was still worried what internal injuries he may have, because the attackers “pummeled him in the stomach,” “he was being thrown around,” and it was “really, really scary.”

She has provided her footage to the police.

When asked about getting punched in the face, Palmeri said she was “definitely shook up,” because she had never had “anyone lunge at me before, which was a “disregulating” experience. Fortunately, she continued, she felt she had lucked out because the person who hit her wasn’t able to do so with full force.

“The girl that punched me was on the outer circles. She didn’t land a really good punch,” she said. “She went sideways at my face rather than straight at my face, and so it wasn’t a hard punch, where that caused any problems” or major injuries — “you could see my face looks okay.”

She repeated again how she had just reacted on instinct, “running into it…I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to see that guy die on the street — I would never forgive myself if someone died on the street in front of me.”

“I was just trying to do what I thought was the best thing to do at that time,” she said. “And the first thing I thought was go into it and try to stop it. The second thing I thought was call 911, and then I thought document it, so at least I have some evidence to hand over to them if I can’t do anything in the meantime,” and then “post on the internet so people know that this is happening.”

The Lululemon store manager thanked her for her help. Palmeri described waiting for the police as something that “felt like a very long time — there are moments in life that are very short that feel like a long time and that was one of those moments.”

“I think I did my civic duty,” she said, telling how she was interviewed by the police officers outside the store, and provided her footage to the police and the Lululemon store managers. “I was just a bystander with the phone and I tried to stop it and that’s it.”

Palmeri posted about the incident on her Substack page as well.

Watch the videos above via Tara Palmeri on X and YouTube.