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CEO caught harassing gay teen who wore dress to prom. Kathy Griffin helped him get “online famous.”

Kathy Griffin/Sam Johnson
Kathy Griffin/Sam Johnson Photo: Shutterstock/Screenshot

Update: Sam Johnson, CEO of VisuWell, has been fired.

Video of a Nashville executive harassing a gay couple at a prom has gone viral, and even comedian Kathy Griffin has called out the arrogant CEO.

“You look like an idiot,” Sam Johnson, 46, CEO of the telemedicine platform VisuWell, can be heard telling student Dalton Stevens, who showed up at Franklin High School’s prom in a red dress.

Related: Kathy Griffin gets ultimate revenge on MAGA harasser by turning her in to FBI for rioting at Capitol

“We went to this hotel close to where we live and we got a lot of good photos and we were there for about an hour and right as we were about to leave we standing outside in this little middle area with a bunch of buildings surrounding us,” said Jacob Geittmann, Stevens’s boyfriend who recorded the video and posted it to TikTok.

“This man comes up and he’s about an inch away from my boyfriend and he says, ‘What are you wearing?’ And he’s like, ‘A dress, why?’ And he’s like, ‘Why are you wearing that? You shouldn’t be wearing that.'”

Geittmann said that Johnson started “going on and on” with “homophobic banter” like “You look disgusting, you look ridiculous, you look like an idiot. Men shouldn’t be wearing this.”

His video starts with the confrontation already in progress. Stevens is telling Johnson to get away from him. The teen walks to go into the hotel, and Johnson follows him.

An adult can be heard telling Johnson to stop because it’s “a special night” for the teens, and he shrugs in his short-sleeve collared shirt and grins.

“I’m sorry, I’m gorgeous,” the teen says.

“Are you?” Johnson responds.

At one point, Johnson swings at Geittmann’s phone and tells him to stop recording. He also appears to hit Stevens in the arm.

In another video, Geittman said that Johnson succeeded in knocking the phone out of his hand and it hit the ground, which is not shown. He said Johnson was “pretty obviously drunk.”

After being posted to TikTok this past Saturday, the video went viral and was shared on Reddit and Twitter.

“It seems like he’s dying to be online famous,” Kathy Griffin wrote when sharing it on Twitter.

Johnson told NewsWeek that the allegations against him are “entirely false.” He said that the gay teens were “obnoxious” and “loud” and that he wanted them to “tone down the vulgarities around the families and children who were present.”

He said he was at the restaurant at the hotel when he “was presented with their loud cursing.”

“Making it about the dress was their idea and they edited out most of the exchange. I have no ill will towards anyone or their personal choices, so long as it does not harm me or my family.”

After the encounter, Geittman said that his boyfriend “looked gorgeous, everybody loved it, and nobody had a problem with it.”

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