Victim of NYC racist boot fire attack said she had to stand up to social media trolls

A woman whose boots were burned by a pair of MAGA-loving Internet bloggers during a racist tirade in Manhattan told the News she felt violated sexually before the street encounter turned racial, and said getting them off the street will save another victim from dealing with the pain she’s still processing.

“”They just walked up to me,” the 54-year-old social worker said of the Feb.19 assault. “They were strangers and just walked up to me. They just said, ‘You’re beautiful, can I kiss you?’

I said, ‘No’.

He said, ‘If you were my slave, I could kiss you,’ and that’s how it started.”

The victim, 54, fresh off a birthday the day before, said she was picking up a cake in Chelsea to continue the celebration when she clashed with the cretins, one of whom wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat at W. 26th St. and Seventh Ave. She declined to be identified by her full name.

Cops said Michael Santiago, 31, and Michael James, 33, confronted the Black woman and unleashed a slew of racist insults that were caught on camera and posted online.

“I want to f— you right up your n—– a–,” the man in the MAGA hat screamed. “I want to f— a slave. You’re my slave. You’re my slave.”

At one point, one of the provocateurs asked to kiss the victim’s pair of boots. Instead, she said, he knelt down and set one of her boots on fire with a hand-held blowtorch.

The hair on the boots were singed but the flames quickly petered out, a video of the incident shows. Cops say the $89 pair of boots were ruined.

Both men were arrested almost a week later and charged with attempted assault, criminal mischief and menacing, all as hate crimes, as well as aggravated harassment, arson and criminal tampering.

The two suspects live in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side, according to cops.

The social worker said she is still traumatized by the afternoon attack.

“I was shocked. I was very shocked,” she said. “I never heard these words before. No one has ever called me a slave, ever. I’m a very honorable woman. I went to college. At the end of the day, men don’t talk to me like that. These men, telling me to suck their d—-, calling me a slave, calling me a bitch, all of these things,. I’m over a certain age. I’m 54. At my age, I don’t have encounters like that.”

If she hadn’t stood up to them, she said, things could have escalated with some other woman.

“If they had not tried to kiss me, if they had not tried to set me on fire, this wouldn’t have ended where it did,” she said. “The problem wasn’t that they were racially derogatory. The problem is they were physically assaultive. They invaded my space sexually. They were 360 degrees of wrong.”

The charges against Santiago and James are being prosecuted as hate crimes, officials said.

The woman, who also took video of them, said she felt compelled to stand up to them.

“One of the reasons I chose to step forward is because I am an older woman,” she said. “What if a 19-year-old woman had to go through this. She doesn’t have the same life experience as me. They didn’t start off burning people. They started trolling and doing things. But this time they burned somebody, so what comes next? How much more are we going to allow them to do.”

The internet trolls livestream videos of themselves appearing to harass everyday New Yorkers, provoking outrage, and often finding themselves being thrown out of apartment buildings, bodegas and other establishments.

For both suspects, the Thursday arrests were their first run-in with the law, cops said.

The duo has about 1,670 subscribers on YouTube, 1,400 followers on Kick and just 295 followers on Instagram.

Despite the hate speech, the social worker said the incident is beyond racial or political for her.

“The Republicans are all saying he’s a Democrat,” she said. “I’m not into that. I believe in families, I believe families should be able to walk down any block in New York City and be OK.”