Karen Fukuhara, known for her superhero roles on Suicide Squad and The Boys, is calling for an end to anti-Asian violence after being randomly attacked on the street.
In a social media post captioned “Stop Asian Hate,” the actress, 30, detailed being “struck in the head” by a random man on the street. While she’s physically fine, “This sh*t needs to stop,” she wrote. “Us women, Asians, the elderly need your help.”
The Los Angeles native didn’t reveal specifically where the attack took place but said she was walking to a café for coffee when “out of nowhere” a stranger hit her so hard her hat flew off. He then began yelling at her — again, for no reason.
“We made no eye contact before, I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary,” Fukuhara said of the surprise attack. “By the time I looked back, he was a few feet away from me,” explaining, “He must have kept walking after hitting me.”
The man then started walking toward her again and she considered confronting him but decided it wasn’t “worth the risk. After a few seconds of staring at each other, and him yelling at me, he eventually walked away.”
She said it was “the first time I’ve been harmed physically” in a time where anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. However, she “has had “racial slurs and hurtful actions … directed to me in the past. I write this because I’ve had conversations with racial friends of mine that had no idea these hate crimes happen to everyday, regular people — people that they share meals with. I felt it was important to raise awareness.”
Fukuhara said that in this instance she feels she ultimately “got lucky” because the man wasn’t carrying a weapon and didn’t continue his unprovoked assault.
“The shock of this experience has me thinking about taking self-defense classes,” she wrote. “But why is this something we as ‘victims’ have to think about? What satisfaction are these perpetuators getting from hitting women, Asians, the ELDERLY? They need to be held accountable,” she added, noting that the problem needs a community response.
Fukuhara’s incident comes at time when crime against Asians continues to rise. According to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in California State University, San Bernardino, hate crimes targeting the Asian American community increased by 342 percent in eight major cities in 2021 compared to figures from the previous year. The cities include Los Angeles, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
Just this week, a Yonkers, N.Y., man was arrested after entering an apartment building vestibule and hitting a woman on the head 125 times because she was Asian, officials said.
