Stranger kisses Kentucky news reporter during live broadcast
A stranger went right up to a Kentucky news reporter and kissed her on the cheek during a live broadcast at a music festival — an act that she blasted as “not OK.”
Sara Rivest, an on-air reporter for WAVE 3 News, was reporting on the Bourbon & Beyond festival from outside the Kentucky Exposition Center Friday when a man can be seen grinning as he makes a smacking motion with his hand behind her, video posted to the reporter’s Twitter account shows.
As Rivest continues her stand-up, a second man quickly runs in front of her.
But the shenanigans didn’t end there — the first man returned and smooched her on the cheek before running away a second time.
“OK, that was not appropriate,” Rivest said on air. “But … let’s just go to the story.”
After a feature about the festival is shown, Rivest reappears on the screen.
“Now Sara, are you OK?” news anchor John Boel is shown asking Rivest. “Are you free from the kissing bandit there? There’s a police officer right behind you if you need him.”
“Oh, yeah,” she replied, laughing. “I might need some help.”
But in reality, the incident wasn’t a laughing matter for Rivest, she told anchor Dawne Gee in a later interview.
“This is not OK,” she said. “Now in his mind, I’m sure he thought this was harmless fun. He probably thought it would make his friends laugh and that he’d get a few seconds on TV.”
“I personally didn’t know how to react,” she added. “I was shocked, but my nervous laughter does not equate to approval of his actions. It was an exertion of power over me, a woman trying to do her job who couldn’t stop him. This embarrassed me, and it made me feel uncomfortable and powerless.”
Rivest tweeted out the clip with the caption, “Hey mister, here’s your 3 seconds of fame. How about you not touch me? Thanks!!”
Rivest told USA Today that she loudly confronted the man once the camera stopped rolling.
“I just started screaming, ‘You’re so rude! You’re so rude!’” she said. “And I was just yelling at the top of my lungs. But he was long gone, like he ran.”
Police said they are considering the incident “harassment with physical contact” and will put a warrant out for the kisser’s arrest once he is identified, the reporter told Gee.
A Louisville Metro Police Department spokesman told the Courier Journal Tuesday that the suspect had yet to be identified.
“But me personally, if police don’t identify him, I just hope that a woman or a man in his life will see this and will let him know and anyone else who thinks this type of behavior is cute … that it’s not funny,” Rivest told Gee. “So the bottom line here is, I wouldn’t come to anyone’s workplace and harass them, and I just ask, please let me do my job, too.”