Rob Bliss, the viral video director who filmed the video of volunteer Shoshana B. Roberts, says that none of it was staged. “What I did was walk in front of her, with earbuds in and sunglasses on, with a hole cut in the back of my shirt, wearing a hidden GoPro camera,” he wrote in an email to TIME. “I didn’t have any contact with any of these guys, the whole idea was to be a stone wall and just let everyone else bounce off us.”
“I’m harassed when I smile and I’m harassed when I don’t. I’m harassed by white men, black men, latino men,” Roberts noted in a press release accompanying the video. “Not a day goes by when I don’t experience this.”
