The Virginia towing company at the center of the viral video that led to the suspension of ESPN reporter Britt McHenry does not want her to lose her job because of the comments she made.
The video released Thursday shows McHenry going off on an employee of Advanced Towing, based in Arlington, after her car was towed. McHenry made negative comments about the worker’s teeth, education and job.
“Parking enforcement is contentious by nature,” the company said in a statement released Friday. “At the same time, neither Gina, our lot clerk, nor our company, have any interest in seeing Britt McHenry suspended or terminated as a result of her comments.
“As a small business, we saw no benefit to releasing the video except to highlight personal attacks employees in jobs like towing, public parking enforcement and others sometimes encounter. The video was not licensed or sold to anyone.”
MyFoxDC.com reports McHenry is not the only person to have trouble with Advanced Towing.
Ron Haskell told the website his car was towed in 2008 for having expired tags while he was in a Shirlington DMV getting his tags renewed. When Haskell got to the company lot, he said his car was blocked and there was no one there to move the other cars. Haskell remembers being angry, but his wife told him to go outside to cool off.
“I was lucky I had someone there to calm me down,” Haskell told the site.
Jeanette Williamson told MyFoxDC.com that the woman McHenry berated was the same person that gave her problems two years ago at the company.
“I was trying to be nice to her in the beginning,” Williamson said. “She was so rude, wouldn’t make eye contact then I just started to get irate. She started to say mean things to me. And it fired me up even more.”
ESPN suspended McHenry for one week. McHenry issued an apology in a tweet Thursday and plans to learn from her mistake.
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