SoHo Karen's lawyer very concerned about her mental health, is clearly not well and needs help

‘Soho Karen’ Miya Ponsetto has returned to New York City following her extradition from California where she had been held behind bars. 

The 22-year-old was taken into custody at New York’s First Precinct Saturday morning to face charges over her attack on a black teenager.

Prosecutors in New York plan to charge Ponsetto with four felonies of attempted robbery, endangering the welfare of a child, attempted grand larceny, and attempted assault.  

She was arrested on a New York warrant Thursday afternoon following a brief car chase in her home state of California.

Ponsetto had appeared in Ventura County court, California, via Zoom just after 2pm Friday for a hearing where she agreed to extradition. 

Her lawyer, Sharen H. Ghatan, has said her client’s mental health is particularly fragile at the present time.

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‘I’m very concerned about her mental health and wellbeing because for her to start an interview with such a defiant tone, disregarding everything she’s saying, including myself, and I’m here for her best interest, concerned me greatly,’ Ghatan said.

‘She’s just not well. I am not a psychiatrist… She’s not well, that is all I can say. She needs help, and it is not the type of help I can give.’ 

Ghatan added that Ponsetto was the most challenging client she has had to deal with in a long time.

‘Out of a hundred clients, you might get one that doesn’t listen, the other 99 want to listen. She happens to be the one.

‘I am uncertain as to how I’m going to proceed,’ Ghatan revealed. ‘I’m uncertain if I can proceed forward with a client who is unwilling and unaccepting of the legal advice I’m giving her.’ 

Ponsetto was filmed tackling 14-year-old Keyon Harrold Jr – the son of Grammy-winning jazz musician Keyon Harrold – to the ground at the Arlo Hotel in Manhattan back on December 26 after falsely accusing him of stealing her iPhone.  

Hours before her arrest on Thursday she had given a rambling interview with CBS This Morning’s Gayle King where she denied racism was a factor in the December attack and refused to admit she physically assaulted the teenage boy.

In her interview, Ponsetto apologized for making the teen feel ‘inferior’.

She admitted she could have handled the situation differently but stopped short of acknowledging she attacked the teen, despite footage to the contrary. 

Ponsetto also apologized for hurting the boy’s feelings but then suddenly snapped back at King telling her ‘Alright Gayle, enough’ as she was pressed on the incident and told that she was ‘old enough to know better’. 

‘I don’t feel like this one mistake does define me.’ ‘I consider myself to be super sweet,’ she stated. ‘I’m a 22-year-old girl… how is one girl accusing a guy about a phone a crime?’ 

Ponsetto revealed how she did not stop everyone in the hotel lobby when she believed her phone had been stolen.

‘I was approaching the people that had been exiting the hotel – because in my mind, anybody exiting might be the one trying to steal my phone,’ she said. 

When asked about her physically attacking the teen, Ponsetto repeated previous claims that the boy’s father actually attacked her.

‘The footage shows me attacking his son, attacking him how? Yelling at him, yes. OK, I apologize. Can we move on?’ she said.  

Lawyer, Ghatan, also told Ponsetto not to wear the black baseball cap emblazoned with the word ‘Daddy’ on it. 

‘The hat definitely wasn’t chosen by me,’ Ghatan said to The Daily Beast who also revealed that she decided to cancel other planned interviews after realizing what a train wreck the CBS one had been.

‘My office gave her advice on what to wear. We asked her to wear professional attire. When she came to the interview, I told her the baseball hat wouldn’t be something we could use in the interview. One because of the lighting, two because of the logo. She was very defiant and insistent that she wear it. I specifically asked her to remove it before the interview. She said it’s her story, it’s her hat, and she wants to wear it. She’s a very challenging client.’      

Speaking about the interview, Ghatan revealed that she tried to reign Ponsetto in.

‘I interrupted Miya several times, and I intervened several times. I made statements and tried my best, but she would cut me off and stop. It put me at a disadvantage to help her.’ 

On Friday afternoon, Ponsetto appeared during a court hearing by video. She spoke only once answering ‘yes’ when asked by Judge David M. Hirsch if she understood why she was there and then agreed to her extradition.

Tuttle, the Los Angeles public defender representing Ponsetto after she parted ways with her initial attorney in recent days, agreed that the woman had ‘no objection’ to the extradition.

‘I did speak with Ms. Posetto prior to court, and that is correct, she has signed the waiver and she has no objection to being transported to New York,’ Tuttle said. 

Her attorney did not request for her to be released on bail.  

Hirsch said charges against Ponsetto in Ventura County will be heard in a court hearing later in April 6 2021. 

It was not clear what those charges would be. However they may relate to the police chase that led to her arrest as well as possible violations of probation orders on her current rap sheet.  

The Harrold family have claimed the incident was racially motivated but Ponsetto has denied this. 

Ponsetto was taken into custody on a New York warrant on Thursday after a brief car chase with police in Ventura County, California.    

The New York Police Department had flown detectives out to California a day earlier with a warrant for Ponsetto’s arrest over the violent incident at the Arlo Hotel in Manhattan. 

Ventura County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Ponsetto after spotting her driving near her home in Piru, northwest of Los Angeles. 

Authorities said she drove two blocks before finally stopping her vehicle but then refused to get out of the car. 

‘She tried to slam the door on one of the deputies and that’s when they just reached in and forcibly removed her,’ Ventura County Sheriff’s spokesman Eric Buschow said. 

Senior Det. Dominguez with the Sheriff’s Fugitive Unit said he had read Ponsetto her rights when he arrested her and that she had signed a waiver agreeing to her extradition, according to New York Daily News  

The sheriff’s office are now asking county prosecutors in California to also charge her with resisting arrest.     

Her arrest came after days of intense media coverage of the fracas at the hotel and demands by the teen’s family and activists that Ponsetto face criminal charges. 

In a video recorded by the teen’s father, Ponsetto was seen pushing and grabbing both father and son.

She was recorded demanding the teenager’s phone, claiming he had stolen it from her. 

Harrold Sr can be heard in the recording telling Ponsetto to leave his son alone. 

Security video later released by the NYPD shows Ponsetto frantically grabbing at the teen as he tried to get away from her through the hotel’s front door. She’s seen clutching him from behind before both tumble to the ground. 

Moments after the scuffle ended, her missing phone was found in an Uber and returned to her by the driver, Harrold Sr has said.    

NYPD detectives flew to California to help locate her after Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance signed off on charges of attempted robbery and felony fugitive from justice. 

The altercation drew comparisons to cases like that of Amy Cooper, a white woman who was charged with filing a false report for calling 911 and saying she was being threatened by ‘an African American man’ during a dispute in New York’s Central Park in May. 

His parents have said her arrest is ‘a start’.

‘I pray for her. In the context of all the excuses her attorney made, at this point it’s not even about an apology any more,’ the teen’s father told ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday.

The teen has been in music therapy ever since the incident, his family say. 

P
onsetto’s lawyer, Sharen Ghatan, told The Associated Press in an interview before the arrest that her client is ’emotionally unwell’ and remorseful for the ordeal.  

Ghatan said she spoke to her client earlier on Thursday and that ‘she strikes me as someone who’s unwell.’

She said Ponsetto ‘lashed out’ over worry about her phone disappearing and that it wasn’t racially motivated.

It ‘could have been anyone,’ she said. 

On Wednesday, Ghatan had claimed that Ponsetto was having an anxiety attack during the hotel incident and insisted that it was not racially motivated.  

‘Miya is young, She let her emotions get the best of her. That phone could have been in the hand of 90-year-old grandma, an Asian person.. someone black or blue. It wasn’t a race related issue. Things took a life of their own,’ Ghatan told NBC.  

The lawyer explained that Ponsetto, who is from California, had been traveling alone while visiting her father in New York City for Christmas. 

She had been relying on her phone to help her navigate the city and became nervous and ‘triggered’ after realizing she had lost it. 

‘She was a scared girl alone in a city she doesn’t know and lost her one point of contact for her numbers. She lost her mind for a hot minute. She is sorry,’ Ghatan said.   

She said Ponsetto has since acknowledged that she lost her temper and acted inappropriately and ‘wouldn’t do it again’. She now wants to ‘give peace to the family’ and apologize.

Ghatan said she and Ponsetto have contacted attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the Harrold family, in hopes of arranging a meeting but have yet to hear back.

‘It’s horrible, what happened. She certainly should not have done that. She has some things she has to work through with herself, control issues, anger management issues. Of course she knows that,’ Ghatan said.

‘She wants to clarify and give peace to the family. She’s mixed race. She specifically said it’s not about race. The way she talks, it’s not even an issue. It was the phone.’   

The lawyer denied accusations that Ponsetto was a ‘lady of privilege’, adding that she is of Puerto Rican descent who works ‘9-5 at a typical place’. 

Ponsetto plans to address the controversy publicly when the time is right, but is ‘fragile’ at the moment. 

Ponsetto’s mother and her attorney have expressed concern over her well-being, telling TMZ she has gone off the grid and has not been responding to messages.

They told the tabloid she has received threats and even visits to her home from strangers.   

Thursday’s arrest isn’t the first time Ponsetto has had a brush with law enforcement. 

Court records obtained by TMZ showed Ponsetto was arrested twice for driving under the influence of alcohol last year – once in May and again in October.  

Those incidents followed a separate arrest back in February when she and her mother were charged for drunkenly refusing to leave a h
otel in Los Angeles.