Last month, a video of a young woman berating a Metro-North conductor went viral online; the woman—who had responded to the conductor, “Do you know what schools I went to and how well-educated I am?” when asked to stop loudly cursing—was quickly outed through the Internet as Hermon Raju, an N.Y.U. graduate.
After the incident, we exchanged Facebook messages with a profile purporting to be that of Ms. Raju, and she provided us a phone number with an 845 area code—the very code that services Garrison, N.Y., the hamlet to which Ms. Raju told the conductor she was traveling. We eventually called upon hearing the news over the weekend that Ms. Raju had hired a P.R. firm.
Her Facebook page, we noted, had since been deactivated.
“This is her mother,” we were told, “and she doesn’t want to talk to you. Please don’t call again.” Was it true that her daughter had hired public-relations people—and was this what they’d advised?
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_
