Woman who snapped photo of Geoffrey Owens at Trader Joe’s speaks out: ‘If I could take it back I would’
The woman who snapped the viral photo of actor Geoffrey Owens bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s now says she wishes she could take it all back.
Karma Lawrence didn’t think much of it when she snapped a photo of Owens at the Clifton, N.J., grocery store – she was a fan of his work on “The Cosby Show” and suspected that Bill Cosby’s sex assault scandal had somehow led to Owens losing his residuals.
“I didn’t think anything bad about it,” she told NJ.com. “I work a normal job. I actually wanted to go up to him and say something, but I thought, ‘You might embarrass him.’ But then I did something that actually embarrassed him more.”
Lawrence, 50, said she frequents Hollywood and celebrity gossip websites and felt it was a natural instinct to take a photo in the presence of a famous face.
“I don’t know why I snuck a picture,” she said. “I figured everybody does it. I don’t know what possessed me. I just did it. I didn’t even think about it. I just kind of did it on impulse and it was a bad impulse.”
The photo soon made its way to outlets like the Daily Mail and Fox News, which shamed Owens for his apparent fall from life as a celebrity.
Lawrence said she was not paid by any of the outlets that published the photo, and did not mean any harm; she was simply surprised to see “the guy from ‘The Cosby Show’” working at her Trader Joe’s.
“It wasn’t malicious,” she said. “That’s on my kids, my grandkids, my parents. I’m not that type of a person. I’m not the monster they’re making me out to be.”
The backlash against the headlines shaming Owens were swift, as was the backlash against Lawrence.
She told NJ.com she received many angry messages online that made her cry for half an hour.
Lawrence wasn’t the only one upset – in an interview with “Good Morning America,” Owens said he was “devastated” by the job-shaming, though his attitude had turned around after a massive outpouring of support.
Meanwhile, Lawrence said she shuttered all of her social media profiles and has had trouble sleeping knowing that she hurt an actor of whom she is a fan.
“I would tell him, ‘I am extremely, extremely apologetic about what has happened,’” she said. “And if I could take it back, I would.”
Still, the whole incident may have prompted a resurgence of sorts for Owens, a Yale graduate who has had steady work over the past few years on shows like “Elementary” and “Divorce.”
Tyler Perry offered Owens an acting job on Twitter yesterday, a move Owens called “encouraging.”
Owens, who has since quit his job at Trader Joe’s, previously insisted he did not want to accept acting roles based on anything other than merit, but was happy to see increased interested that could lead to auditions.