The disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at Dollar Tree stores: ‘They find it funny to degrade women’

Published 20 July 2026 · general

This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault. The woman known in court papers as MR never much liked going to dollar stores. She found

This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault. 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.” View image in fullscreen A customer shops in a Dollar Tree store in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images 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. double quotation mark 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 Jamieson Webster 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.) View image in fullscreen A woman’s Instagram post about a man who allegedly sexually assaulted her in a Dollar Tree location in Houston, as shared on X.