So that Long Island woman who was arrested this weekend for cheering on a fight between 12-year-old girls before getting into an altercation with a tweenager herself? The story continues to get stranger—and now it includes grainy cellphone footage and charges of cyberbullying! This is what the Internet was made for.
Yesterday police would not confirm that the Daphne Melin, the 32-year-old mother of three in question, was related to the fighting children but now it appears that not only was she the mom of one of the girls—she drove her to the fight. But its okay, she says, since the whole thing was an attempt to stop cyberbullying. "My daughter's been cyber-bullied. They called her whore, b---h and the 's' word," Melin told a Daily News reporter. "I've talked to the principals at her school, and that's gotten me nowhere—no help. I've taken it upon myself to do what I had to do."
And what she had to do apparently included driving her daughter to a playground for a good old fashioned tussle and, as you can hear in the audio of this cellphone video that briefly hit YouTube, calling out things like "Take her down!" and "Let's fight!"
And after the fight, it only got stranger. One of the other spectators, another 12-year-old girl, apparently told Melin that she should have been doing something about the violence. So she did. According to the police (and the above video) the woman "cursed and spat on the girl before kicking her and kneeing her in the neck and head twice."
Melin, for her part, says this whole thing is just a misunderstanding! “It’s not true. I’m not the monster they make me out to be,” she told CBS2. She claims the truth about the cyberbullying that led to the fight (which may have been about a the attentions of pre-teen boy) will come to light in court. Where, incidentally, she is due to be arraigned on December 1.
