A viral clip showing a woman juggling a toddler and food at a baseball game sparked outrage online, with viewers urging her to divorce her husband. Now she has come out and explained the truth.
During a San Francisco Giants game against the Minnesota Twins at Oracle Park, cameras caught a woman named Erika making her way back to her seat while carrying her toddler, wearing a backpack, and balancing three food containers.
Her husband Ramses appeared to take one of the food boxes and start eating while she remained standing, holding the child and the rest of the food.
Giants announcers Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow noticed too.
“Holy smokes, Mike! Look at this,” Kuiper said, before praising Erika’s ability to juggle everything at once.
The clip spread like wildfire and garnered tens of millions of views within days and comment sections filled with people urging Erika to leave her husband.
“I hope that lady sees this and reevaluates her relationship. If there wasn’t a bigger sign to leave his a**, here it f***ing is,” one person wrote.
“How do I divorce someone else’s husband?” a comment that got nearly 115,000 likes on an Instagram reel of the clip read.
Some viewers pushed back, however.
“You don’t know the dynamic of their relationship, she could’ve picked up the food on her way back from the restroom while he watched the seats, please shut up,” one commenter argued.
What actually happened
Turns out the skeptics were right.
Erika later explained that around the fifth inning, she’d gone to use the restroom and change her daughter’s diaper. Her husband had offered to keep their daughter with him while she went, but she chose to take the baby with her, and picked up the food on her way back since she was already near the concession stands.
She also said Ramses had offered to let her eat first, but she told him to go ahead since she’d already eaten before the game.
“Before you decide what our marriage looks like, I would like you to hear from the woman you’re defending,” she wrote on Substack, describing Ramses as “an amazing husband and an even better father” as they raise two children under the age of two together.
Ramses received death threats
Erika also described the very real harm the video caused.
“Some people have gone out of their way to find our names and phone numbers. Some of you have told my husband to kill himself,” she wrote.
Sociology professor Lisa Strohschein told CBC clips like this tend to resonate because they give people an outlet for frustrations that go well beyond the actual moment on screen.
“A conversation the audience couldn’t hear became the basis for millions of judgments about that life,” as Erika herself put it.
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