Woman Sues Dollar Tree Over 'Sharking' Sexual Assaults, Uncovering National Phenomenon

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.

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 – reindeer ears and Santa hats – 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.

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. “You’re so disgusting, get away from me,” she told him, and hurried off to find her friend.

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 – until, back outside in the chill of the winter morning, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.

The man had ejaculated on her.

“I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to kill this man,” 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’s identity but is not publishing her full name to protect her privacy.)

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: “Tenemos otra.”

“We’ve got another one.”

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 – one that had been shared on social media and at least one other she heard about anecdotally from shopping center employees – 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.

It even came with its own specialized vocabulary. Masturbating in public and surreptitiously ejaculating on random women was known as “tagging” or “sharking” – or even “cum-sharking”. Online forums praised perpetrators for being “low inhibition” or “low inhib”, and users contributing to the discussion said they wished they could summon the same fearlessness in themselves.

Dollar Tree cropped up again and again as a favored location for such attacks, according to research conducted by MR’s 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: inadequate safety and security, understaffing on the premises, and disorganized aisles filled with unopened boxes that offer shoplifters and other criminals ample opportunity to skulk.

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. “We take reports of inappropriate, unlawful, or harassing behavior in our stores extremely seriously,” a spokesperson said. “Any incident of this nature is unacceptable, and when we become aware of criminal activity, we cooperate fully with law enforcement and support their investigations.”

As soon as MR spoke to a local TV station in Houston about her story, she and her lawyers heard many similar ones – either via social media or directly from women who recognized what she was talking about and wanted legal representation of their own. “This happened to me in November of last year,” one woman wrote on X. “Same store, same location.” That woman had previously posted images, also on X, of a man she said followed her out of the same Dollar Tree, in Houston’s River Oaks shopping center, and ejaculated in front of her in the parking lot. (Attempts by the Guardian to reach the woman were unsuccessful.)

MR’s 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’s deputy. Another was a Dollar Tree employee.

“We couldn’t believe how big the scale was,” Greenberg said.

Almost immediately, the lawyers stumbled on another weird dimension to the cases they were developing: an online subculture of lonely, disaffected men, known as “gooners”, who bond with one other over their shared fascination with obsessive masturbation and compete with each other to see who can keep going for hours or even days at a time.

While most appear to pursue their self-pleasure in private “goon caves” 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.

Greenberg and Blizzard could not establish how public MR’s assailant had been with his exploits, since he has never been identified. But they did find an individual going by the name “Goon-God”, who had a page on an amateur porn site offering more than 200 sharking videos for $25 – 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.

Another gooner, who was caught filming himself while masturbating at a Dollar Tree in Fern Park, Florida, told police that he did this regularly “in different locations” and uploaded the videos to an OnlyFans page, according to his arrest report.

MR’s lawyers believe this constitutes a new frontier in sexual assault – what Cecelia Prewett, a consultant to the legal team, describes as a “gamification” of sexual abuse perpetrated and encouraged by isolated men who pool their anger towards women in online forums.

It’s a view broadly shared by criminologists and sociologists who study the intersection between human sexuality and crime – although they note a similar wave of sharking attacks in Japan about 15 years ago that attracted an online audience before subsiding again.

“Masturbating over someone in public is done – and filmed – for the purposes of humiliating women and also receiving attention and accolades from other men,” said Michael Halpin, a sociologist from Dalhousie University in Canada who has studied the relationship between male “incel” culture and gender-based crime. “The [online] community applauds it, supports it, uplifts it and calls for more acts like it.”

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.

“Fame and celebrity are held up by many people as the ultimate form of success – more than wealth,” said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist. “To some fringe individuals, this form of provocative behavior, no matter how distasteful, can be seen as a ticket to their own form of attention.”

The degradation may even be the point, said Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst who teaches at the New School in New York. “A dollar store is the most abject place, where people who are already at the bottom go because they can’t afford anything else. In some way this is about trying to get a leg up on the lowest rung you can fall to – how to make a dollar on people who only have a dollar,” she said. “There’s something about that that feels so sad and tragic.”

The acts themselves – public masturbation and ejaculating on strangers – 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 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’s fictional serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, flings his semen at FBI agent Clarice Starling in an effort to sexualize and humiliate her.

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.

Long before it developed an association with criminal acts, “gooning” 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 – whether alone or in public – is as much as men like them can aspire to in life. Webster described it as a “disavowed manic state of triumph over something hideous”.

One common trope of the pornography that these gooners consume has men ejaculating over women’s bodies, faces and hair – acts that, Lankford said, have no basis in evolutionary biology and are difficult to interpret as anything other than demeaning to the women.

The Dollar Tree assaults essentially bring these elements together, turning a criminal act into some combination of a dare and a misogynistic joke. “Damn that’s pretty cool,” reads one comment on an incel forum in response to a 2018 sharking video. (The video has since been taken down.) “How did he not get caught there lol,” reads another.

And the phenomenon appears to be growing.

Six months after the attack on MR, a woman at a Dollar Tree in Philadelphia captured her own sharking episode on video and the clip subsequently went viral.

“He fucking nutted on my fucking leg!” the woman can be heard yelling as she chases her assailant out of the store. The man is clearly visible in surveillance photos released by the police.

The Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill reposted the video with the offer of a $2,000 reward for anyone willing to “play manhunt”. 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.

Over the following months, the term “dollar store gooner” became a meme on the internet that spread far beyond the closed world of the gooners themselves. A “Dollar Tree gooner” crypto coin launched in January 2025, followed by an unofficial Pokémon card and a song released on SoundCloud by an underground noise band from Tennessee named Mukus.

Around the same time, another episode went viral – not at a dollar store, but at a coffee shop called Bikini Beans in Tempe, Arizona, where a man was filmed masturbating 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. “They find it funny that the women are getting degraded,” said Halpin, the sociologist.

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’t 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 “goonlord” and dubbed the occasion a “gooneral”.

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.

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.

MR’s lawyers counter that the relevant legal standard is not, in fact, physical harm but “offensive contact”. 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. “My life is not the same since that incident,” she said. “I totally was caught off guard. I didn’t have a chance to defend myself.”

When the Dollar Tree lawyer asked her what she wanted out of the lawsuit, she replied: “You [have] to take accountability of what is happening in your stores. You’re causing pain to people. I don’t know if it’s because of the bottom line, or what, but it’s happening and you guys need to stop it.”

In its statement to the Guardian, Dollar Tree said it was committed to effective safety and security. “Our efforts include ongoing safety education, regular policy reviews, risk assessment and mitigation activities, investments in physical security measures, and collaboration with local law enforcement,” the spokesperson said.

With MR’s 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’s lawyers, company attorney Wesley Welmaker described the assault on MR as a “one-off event at Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center”.

In response, Greenberg told the court that MR’s assault was “anything but a ‘one-off event’” 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.