Laverne Cox ‘In Shock’ After Transphobic Attack In Los Angeles

Laverne Cox revealed that she was “in shock” after she and a friend experienced a transphobic attack in Los Angeles on Saturday.

The Orange Is The New Black actress went live on Instagram on Sunday to recount the incident. She said that a man came up to her and her friend while they were on a socially distanced hike in Griffith Park. The man “very aggressively asks for the time,” she said, and her friend stopped to tell him, even though, she explained, that the New Yorker in her made her keep walking.

“Then the guy who had asked for the time asks my friend ‘Guy or girl?’” Cox, 49, said. “My friend says ‘Fuck off.’ I’m walking, I’m hearing all this is happening like in a split second and then all of a sudden the guy is attacking my friend.”

“I look back and I’m like, ‘What is happening?’” she said. “The guy is like hitting my friend … I pull out my phone and I call to dial 911, and all of a sudden it’s over and the guy is gone.” So, she said she didn’t call the police.

Cox said that she was thankful to have a friend that was willing to defend her, and said that neither her nor her friend were hurt in the incident. She explained that her friend wanted to stay anonymous.

“He was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been out in public with trans people before and that’s never happened,’ ” the actress said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s happened to me a lot.’ It doesn’t always get physical, but yeah. I’ve had a long history of street harassment in New York.”

She added: “If doesn’t matter who you are. You can be, like, Laverne Cox, whatever that means. If you’re trans, you’re going to experience stuff like this.”

“It’s just – it’s not safe in the world,” said in the livestream. “I don’t like to think about that a lot, but it is the truth and it is not safe if you’re a trans person.”