This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault.<\/p>\n
The woman known in court papers as MR never much liked going to dollar stores. She found them cluttered and chaotic, with too few staff on duty and too many strange people roaming the aisles for comfort.<\/p>\n
But in early December 2023 she went anyway, because she was planning a promotional photoshoot for her doggy daycare business in Houston and wanted some cheap Christmas props \u2013 reindeer ears and Santa hats \u2013 to put on her dogs. She and a friend picked one of the few Dollar Trees in an affluent neighborhood and arrived early, thinking they would be in and out quickly enough.<\/p>\n
As she walked the aisles, MR said in an interview, she sensed a man standing close behind her. She turned to confront him and noticed that he was a good six inches taller than her. He was talking in graphic detail about sexual things he wanted to do to her. \u201cYou\u2019re so disgusting, get away from me,\u201d she told him, and hurried off to find her friend.<\/p>\n
Still, he stayed close, and for a few tense minutes the two of them locked eyes while she waited in line to pay. When at last he left, she thought that was the end of it \u2013 until, back outside in the chill of the winter morning, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.<\/p>\n
The man had ejaculated on her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know how to react. I wanted to kill this man,\u201d said MR, who was 47 at the time, recalling the horror and helplessness she felt as her friend wiped her off with towels. (The Guardian has verified MR\u2019s identity but is not publishing her full name to protect her privacy.)<\/p>\n
Hours later, on the advice of a sister who worked in law enforcement, she fished her soiled leggings out of the garbage and took them back to the store to report what had happened. A clerk listened to her account and, not seeming to realize that MR understood Spanish, shouted to a colleague in a backroom: \u201cTenemos otra.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got another one.\u201d<\/p>\n
A customer shops in a Dollar Tree store in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Over the next several weeks and months, MR would learn not only that there had been reports of similar incidents at the same store in the same timeframe \u2013 one that had been shared on social media and at least one other she heard about anecdotally from shopping center employees \u2013 but that masturbating in front of female customers at branches of Dollar Tree was fast becoming a national phenomenon, a disturbing new form of sexual assault that men were documenting and bragging about in dark corners of the internet.<\/p>\n
It even came with its own specialized vocabulary. Masturbating in public and surreptitiously ejaculating on random women was known as \u201ctagging\u201d or \u201csharking\u201d \u2013 or even \u201ccum-sharking\u201d. Online forums praised perpetrators for being \u201clow inhibition\u201d or \u201clow inhib\u201d, and users contributing to the discussion said they wished they could summon the same fearlessness in themselves.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThis is about trying to get a leg up on the lowest rung you can fall to \u2013 how to make a dollar on people who only have a dollarJamieson Webster<\/p>\n
Dollar Tree cropped up again and again as a favored location for such attacks, according to research conducted by MR\u2019s lawyers and corroborated by police and media reports. While perpetrators have not spelled out the reasons, their choice appears connected to the same problems that made MR hesitant to shop at Dollar Tree in the first place and have led, over the years, to intense federal government scrutiny and millions of dollars in fines<\/a>: inadequate safety and security<\/a>, understaffing<\/a> on the premises, and disorganized aisles filled with unopened boxes that offer shoplifters and other criminals ample opportunity to skulk.<\/p>\n In a statement to the Guardian, Dollar Tree did not address the specifics of what happened to MR but said it was committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment for its staff, customers and visitors. \u201cWe take reports of inappropriate, unlawful, or harassing behavior in our stores extremely seriously,\u201d a spokesperson said. \u201cAny incident of this nature is unacceptable, and when we become aware of criminal activity, we cooperate fully with law enforcement and support their investigations.\u201d<\/p>\n As soon as MR spoke to a local TV station in Houston about her story, she and her lawyers heard many similar ones \u2013 either via social media or directly from women who recognized what she was talking about and wanted legal representation of their own. \u201cThis happened to me in November of last year,\u201d one woman wrote on X. \u201cSame store, same location.\u201d That woman had previously posted images, also on X, of a man she said followed her out of the same Dollar Tree, in Houston\u2019s River Oaks shopping center, and ejaculated in front of her in the parking lot. (Attempts by the Guardian to reach the woman were unsuccessful.)<\/p>\n A woman\u2019s Instagram post about a man who allegedly sexually assaulted her in a Dollar Tree location in Houston, as shared on X. Photograph: @soakkedrice\/X<\/p>\n MR\u2019s lawyers, Anna Greenberg and Ed Blizzard, were soon handling cases in Colorado Springs, San Diego and Miami, and collecting police and media reports on more than a dozen similar instances at Dollar Tree or its former sister chain, Family Dollar, going back to 2017. In some cases, the victims were out shopping with their young children. One perpetrator was a freshly hired sheriff\u2019s deputy<\/a>. Another was a Dollar Tree employee.<\/p>\n \u201cWe couldn\u2019t believe how big the scale was,\u201d Greenberg said.<\/p>\n Almost immediately, the lawyers stumbled on another weird dimension to the cases they were developing: an online subculture of lonely, disaffected men, known as \u201cgooners\u201d, who bond with one other over their shared fascination with obsessive masturbation<\/a> and compete with each other to see who can keep going for hours or even days at a time.<\/p>\n While most appear to pursue their self-pleasure in private \u201cgoon caves\u201d and are not criminals, some gooners, the lawyers found, took pride in public acts of masturbation. In fact, some were committing sharking assaults at Dollar Tree stores and posting the footage online.<\/p>\n Greenberg and Blizzard could not establish how public MR\u2019s assailant had been with his exploits, since he has never been identified. But they did find an individual going by the name \u201cGoon-God\u201d, who had a page on an amateur porn site offering more than 200 sharking videos for $25 \u2013 along with a promotional clip that appeared to show an attack on an oblivious Dollar Tree shopper as she pushed a cart along a crowded soap aisle.<\/p>\n Another gooner, who was caught filming himself while masturbating at a Dollar Tree in Fern Park, Florida, told police that he did this regularly \u201cin different locations\u201d and uploaded the videos to an OnlyFans page, according to his arrest report.<\/p>\n double quotation markThis form of provocative behavior, no matter how distasteful, can be seen as a ticket to … attentionAdam Lankford<\/p>\n MR\u2019s lawyers believe this constitutes a new frontier in sexual assault \u2013 what Cecelia Prewett, a consultant to the legal team, describes as a \u201cgamification\u201d of sexual abuse perpetrated and encouraged by isolated men who pool their anger towards women in online forums.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a view broadly shared by criminologists and sociologists who study the intersection between human sexuality and crime \u2013 although they note a similar wave of sharking attacks in Japan about 15 years ago that attracted an online audience before subsiding again.<\/p>\n \u201cMasturbating over someone in public is done \u2013 and filmed \u2013 for the purposes of humiliating women and also receiving attention and accolades from other men,\u201d said Michael Halpin, a sociologist from Dalhousie University in Canada who has studied<\/a> the relationship between male \u201cincel\u201d culture and gender-based crime. \u201cThe [online] community applauds it, supports it, uplifts it and calls for more acts like it.\u201d<\/p>\n Halpin and other researchers say the misogyny is not restricted to people who are involuntarily celibate but extends to a broader community of men who are fueled by a combination of unfulfilled sexual desire, easy access to pornography and the lure of an attention-seeking economy.<\/p>\n \u201cFame and celebrity are held up by many people as the ultimate form of success \u2013 more than wealth,\u201d said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist. \u201cTo some fringe individuals, this form of provocative behavior, no matter how distasteful, can be seen as a ticket to their own form of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n The degradation may even be the point, said Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst who teaches at the New School in New York. \u201cA dollar store is the most abject place, where people who are already at the bottom go because they can\u2019t afford anything else. In some way this is about trying to get a leg up on the lowest rung you can fall to \u2013 how to make a dollar on people who only have a dollar,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s something about that that feels so sad and tragic.\u201d<\/p>\n The acts themselves \u2013 public masturbation and ejaculating on strangers \u2013 long predate the internet, as does their place in the underbelly of popular culture. Jeffrey Dahmer had a history of indecent exposure before he became a serial killer, including an arrest in 1986<\/a> for masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys in Wisconsin. In both the book and film The Silence of the Lambs, a prisoner housed next to Thomas Harris\u2019s fictional serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, flings his semen<\/a> at FBI agent Clarice Starling in an effort to sexualize and humiliate her.<\/p>\n What has changed in the digital age, Lankford argues, is the accessibility of material apt to arouse people in the most anodyne of settings, such as a traffic intersection or a dollar store.<\/p>\n Long before it developed an association with criminal acts, \u201cgooning\u201d was understood as a pornography-fueled compulsion, sometimes involving multiple screens at once, that can become a substitute for intimate relationships with others. It also tends to come with a heavy dose of self-loathing. Experts say that online forums and video content aimed at gooners often send the message that obsessive masturbation \u2013 whether alone or in public \u2013 is as much as men like them can aspire to in life. Webster described it as a \u201cdisavowed manic state of triumph over something hideous\u201d.<\/p>\n One common trope of the pornography that these gooners consume has men ejaculating over women\u2019s bodies, faces and hair \u2013 acts that, Lankford said, have no basis in evolutionary biology and are difficult to interpret as anything other than demeaning to the women.<\/p>\n The Dollar Tree assaults essentially bring these elements together, turning a criminal act into some combination of a dare and a misogynistic joke. \u201cDamn that\u2019s pretty cool,\u201d reads one comment on an incel forum in response to a 2018 sharking video. (The video has since been taken down.) \u201cHow did he not get caught there lol,\u201d reads another.<\/p>\n And the phenomenon appears to be growing.<\/p>\n Six months after the attack on MR, a woman at a Dollar Tree in Philadelphia captured her own sharking episode<\/a> on video and the clip subsequently went viral.<\/p>\n \u201cHe fucking nutted on my fucking leg!\u201d the woman can be heard yelling as she chases her assailant out of the store. The man is clearly visible in surveillance photos<\/a> released by the police.<\/p>\n The Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill reposted the video with the offer of a $2,000 reward for anyone willing to \u201cplay manhunt<\/a>\u201d. Within hours, 35-year-old Gary Miles turned himself in and subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of indecent exposure, open lewdness and indecent assault without the consent of the other party.<\/p>\n A censored screengrab from a video shared on X of a woman who captured her \u2018sharking\u2019 episode at a Dollar Tree in Philadelphia. Photograph: @CollinRugg\/X<\/p>\n Over the following months, the term \u201cdollar store gooner\u201d became a meme on the internet that spread far beyond the closed world of the gooners themselves. A \u201cDollar Tree gooner\u201d crypto coin<\/a> launched in January 2025, followed by an unofficial Pok\u00e9mon card<\/a> and a song<\/a> released on SoundCloud by an underground noise band from Tennessee named Mukus.<\/p>\n Around the same time, another episode went viral \u2013 not at a dollar store, but at a coffee shop called Bikini Beans in Tempe, Arizona, where a man was filmed masturbating<\/a> as he ordered from a female barista at the drive-through window. Again, the online response pointed to some constituency of men who find such things entertaining. \u201cThey find it funny that the women are getting degraded,\u201d said Halpin, the sociologist. \u201cThat\u2019s what they enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n Within hours of the Arizona video appearing online, the perpetrator, who appeared to have no connection to the online subculture fascinated by him, wrote a note to say he couldn\u2019t face his family and killed himself. The episode raised the complicated question of whether the man should be remembered primarily as a sex criminal or as a victim of public shaming. A group of supporters firmly believing the latter organized a protest at the coffee shop to pay homage to a man they called \u201cgoonlord\u201d and dubbed the occasion a \u201cgooneral\u201d.<\/p>\n MR, for her part, was so horrified by her assault that as soon as she got home she walked into the shower fully clothed, only later understanding that she was washing away crucial evidence. She subsequently made extensive efforts to find her assailant and was heartened when a store employee told her there were video surveillance cameras.<\/p>\n But Dollar Tree never produced any footage, never apologized for what happened to her and, when challenged in a lawsuit alleging negligence and failure to provide a secure environment, argued that MR was not entitled to damages under Texas law because she had suffered no physical harm. Without video footage, police and private security officers at the River Oaks shopping center were unable to pursue an investigation.<\/p>\n double quotation mark[Dollar Tree has] to take accountability of what is happening in [its] storesMR<\/p>\n MR\u2019s lawyers counter that the relevant legal standard is not, in fact, physical harm but \u201coffensive contact\u201d. And, in a testy exchange with a lawyer for Dollar Tree during a sworn deposition, MR vigorously challenged the notion that she had suffered no damage. She described how the incident had rocked her confidence, affected her relationships and made her afraid to go out after dark. \u201cMy life is not the same since that incident,\u201d she said. \u201cI totally was caught off guard. I didn\u2019t have a chance to defend myself.\u201d<\/p>\n When the Dollar Tree lawyer asked her what she wanted out of the lawsuit, she replied: \u201cYou [have] to take accountability of what is happening in your stores. You\u2019re causing pain to people. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because of the bottom line, or what, but it\u2019s happening and you guys need to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n In its statement to the Guardian, Dollar Tree said it was committed to effective safety and security. \u201cOur efforts include ongoing safety education, regular policy reviews, risk assessment and mitigation activities, investments in physical security measures, and collaboration with local law enforcement,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n With MR\u2019s lawsuit, though, the company has attempted to limit the introduction of evidence from assaults in other states and other Dollar Tree outlets as a matter of legal strategy. In an August 2025 email to MR\u2019s lawyers, company attorney Wesley Welmaker described the assault on MR as a \u201cone-off event at Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center\u201d.<\/p>\n In response, Greenberg told the court that MR\u2019s assault was \u201canything but a \u2018one-off event\u2019\u201d and pointed to 10 cases of sexual assault at Dollar Trees she had documented over the previous year and a half, six of them involving ejaculation.<\/p>\n A year later, with the lawsuit still mired in preliminary motions and no trial date in sight, Greenberg\u2019s research team has dug up 63 officially documented sex crimes in all \u2013 fewer than five a year before 2020 and as many as 18 a year since the December 2023 attack on MR. Sixteen involved masturbation or ejaculation. The company\u2019s attempts to disavow this, Greenberg said in an interview, amounted to \u201ca plethora of stupid arguments\u201d and only underlined what she saw as a pattern of poor corporate governance.<\/p>\n Dollar Tree, its former sister company Family Dollar (which it sold last summer), and its rival Dollar General have all been under a microscope<\/a> after multiple reports<\/a> in recent years of safety violations, improper storage of drugs, rat infestations, poor security, shoplifting and other crimes including sexual assault that have occurred in its stores. Predominantly, the stores serve low-income neighborhoods<\/a> where there are few alternatives, and critics often accuse them of preferring to endure some degree of criminal behavior occurring in stores and weather fines from the federal government\u2019s workplace watchdog, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), than pay for fully functioning security systems and boost staffing.<\/p>\n People exit a Dollar Tree store in Richmond, California. Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In 2022, an Osha administrator accused<\/a> Dollar General of valuing \u201cprofits more than the safety of the people who work in their stores\u201d. The next year, the Biden administration reached a settlement<\/a> with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, under which the companies agreed without admitting liability to pay $1.35m in outstanding fines and overhaul workplace safety arrangements.<\/p>\n At the time, Dollar Tree said it was taking steps<\/a> to address safety concerns and that the foundations of the company were \u201ccontinuous associate feedback, engagement and root cause analysis to understand issues and ensure compliance\u201d. When asked by the Guardian about continuing criticisms that Dollar Tree was more interested in the bottom line than in adequate security or staffing at its 9,000 US outlets, the company had no comment.<\/p>\n double quotation markThey\u2019re not just doing this for personal gratification … They want other men potentially to do it, tooMichael Halpin<\/p>\n Greenberg and Blizzard believe the Dollar Tree gooner phenomenon can shed further light on these issues and offer an opportunity to address some of them. In MR\u2019s lawsuit and a similar case in San Diego, their legal filings argue that Dollar Tree should have had more staff and security, should have alerted the police to the sharking episodes on its premises and should have issued a warning to shoppers.<\/p>\n In the San Diego case, Greenberg and Blizzard found eyewitness and photographic evidence that the same perpetrator had masturbated and ejaculated on another woman in the same store one day before \u2013 and returned six days later to assault a third victim. \u201cDollar Tree did nothing,\u201d they and a team of California lawyers allege in court papers. Dollar Tree did not respond to questions about this accusation.<\/p>\n The lawyers saw what they allege to be a similar corporate disregard for shopper safety in a case they read about in Knoxville, Tennessee, where a Dollar Tree employee named Collin Miller was caught on camera as he masturbated in front of customers in November 2024. \u201cThe [security] video shows the defendant with his penis exposed as he walks past the register where the victim is checking out,\u201d a police report quoted by a local TV station<\/a> said. \u201cThe video also later shows the defendant rubbing his groin area for several minutes at the register while customers are present in the store.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Miller pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure, he was not fired. And then, eight months later, he was accused of following a family around the store with a camera and taking surreptitious photographs<\/a> up the 16-year-old daughter\u2019s skirt. Once again, the police investigated and, according to media reports, found 25,000 compromising images of women on his phone. He subsequently pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful photographing in violation of privacy. Dollar Tree did not respond to questions about the case and Miller\u2019s employment status.<\/p>\n Halpin, the sociologist, said he sees an overarching pattern linking the Dollar Tree masturbation incidents, photographs like Miller\u2019s \u2013 known as \u201ccreepshots\u201d \u2013 and the compulsion of some perpetrators to post evidence of their exploits online.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not just doing this for personal gratification,\u201d he said. \u201cThey want an audience to engage with it, and they want other men potentially to do it too. When these things are posted, they look at view counts, comments and accolades from other men. And there are other people out there who look and think, \u2018I want that attention as well.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The attention-seeking has a cost. MR said that, two and a half years after her sharking episode, she had found no peace. \u201cI feel like crying,\u201d she said, \u201cand then I get so fucking angry.\u201d<\/p>\n Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn<\/a> offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis<\/a> offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect<\/a> (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org\/rcip\/internl.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault. 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