Over the past month, we’ve seen some stories emerge via TikTok in which young women have shown us how they’ve protected themselves from harassment and in one case, even a potential kidnapping .
But while encounters where a stranger is making people feel unsafe such as these are clearly frightening, it can be even more demoralizing when it’s happening at the hands of someone they have to see regularly.
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And as one woman explained on TikTok, her frustration with precisely that situation led her to mount what turned out to be an effective strategy against one of her gym’s employees.
A 22-year-old TikTok user who goes by Fern describes herself as a “fitness freak from Philippines.”
And while there are several videos on her account of her doing squats at this station, one that she posted on June 4 would become very important to both her and her fellow gym-goers.
And as we can see, that’s because it depicts one of the gym’s instructors approaching her from behind and groping her buttocks.
Judging by her caption stating, “Please idk what to do, he’s always doing this,” this is behavior that this individual has shown a pattern of engaging in and one that left her feeling like she was running out of options.
She released further videos outlining this pattern when some commenters accused her of staging the video.
In one of her follow-ups , she said, “I already talked to the owner about this.”
In yet another TikTok about the matter , she explained that this conversation with the gym’s management was also disappointing because they seemed to focus more on the time it took her to address the situation with them than the instructor’s actions themselves.
And while they said they’d talk to him, nothing seemed to change for her.
However, the management became significantly more responsive after Fern’s first video went public.
Two days after she posted it, she made another follow-up in which she shared a redacted message stating that the instructor had been fired from the gym.
In this video, she also passed on that another gym member told her that she wasn’t the only woman to complain about this person. However, it seems that her video provided enough evidence for the gym’s owners to take action.
With that, she considered the matter resolved.
