NAMED AND SHAMED

Woman Who Threw Viral Racist Rant on United Airlines Bus Is Unmasked

Arlene Bunch is a California real estate agent, who blamed her behavior on a traumatic brain injury she suffered last year.

The woman who went viral for throwing a racist rant on a United Airlines shuttle bus has been revealed as California real estate agent Arlene Bunch.

Bunch was filmed unloading obscenities and racially charged references to Indian food at a man named Pervez Taufiq.

The Indian-American photographer said in a post on Instagram that the situation began when Bunch made racist comments to his son on the flight, and that the situation escalated when she told his kids to “shut up” while they were on the shuttle together.

“Your family is from India, you have no respect, you have no rules, you think you can push everyone, push, push, push,” Bunch says in the video. “That’s what you think you are. You guys are f–king crazy.”

But Bunch took the chance to tell her side of the story in an interview with Fox 11 this week, saying she “get[s] agitated very easily” following a traumatic brain injury that she suffered during a 2023 natural gas explosion at a condo near Mammoth Mountain in California.

Bunch also claimed that Taufiq started the encounter when he “pushed me to the side” and called her a “white trash b---h.”

She added that he was “aggressive when we loaded the shuttle.”

He looks over to me and says ‘shut your big f–king mouth you white trash b---' and then my husband steps in. None of this is in the video. And most people know me as a very kind, calm person, but since the brain injury, I can get agitated very easily.”

Bunch was seriously injured in the explosion last year, according to a GoFundMe posted by her sister. A propane leak caused their stove to explode, trapping Bunch and her family in their house’s rubble with severe injuries.

“I tell everyone I love them,” she said in an interview with The Sheet, a local newspaper, after the explosion. “Because I’m so grateful. That’s my whole new attitude. It’s so bizarre, because I look at everyone, and everyone is so precious – just to be alive, you know? I spend more time talking to strangers… I feel like I’m a brand new baby in a sense of fascination with life itself and people that are alive and, really, where do we go in the end?”

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Grace HarringtonBreaking News Intern

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