A bad night at an open mic is a forgettable bump in the road for any comedian. For social media influencers the Kalogeras Sisters and the Hollywood Comedy club, those five-minute sets have since stretched into racist cyber bullying, death threats, harassment and a cease-and-desist order from both sides.
On Jan. 21, the Canadian siblings Sunday, Demitra, Eliana and their friend Noah Risling, a content creator who collaborates with them, performed on the stage of the club and recorded their experience for their YouTube channel, which boasts 7.4 million followers. The moment the video hit the site, their fans rallied behind them and started to review-bomb the Hollywood Comedy club.
“Very rude and how are you going to host a comedy show and get upset about literally a joke when it’s about comedy, host needs to learn to respect people better,” a one-star review by Melissa L. read on Yelp. “Karma always bites back.”
The number of bad reviews, from people who have never been to the location, has hurt the establishment, said Jiaoying Summers, the owner of the club.
“Because of how they portrayed our club, they falsely accused my staff of sexual harassment,” she said. “We have lost our business completely.”
On a night the Kalogeras Sisters came in, the club’s time slots were at max-capacity. Before the start of the show, the manager asked the host of the night, Barry Montoya, to squeeze in four more performers who had called in.
Since each comic scheduled for the night was allocated 10 minutes, Montoya decided to bump a performer and split the four drop-ins into five minutes each — two early on, and the last two at the end of the night.
Risling and Eliana performed around 9 p.m., according to the host. The remaining two were scheduled for later in the show.
While they waited to go on stage, Montoya said the sisters kept interrupting the show, going up to the host asking when it was their turn. At one point, he said that Demitra confronted him and said, “You said you were gonna f— get us up,” while there was a comic on stage.
Montoya said that to prevent any further distractions, he told her he would bring her up as soon as the performer on stage finished.
When Demitra got on stage and her material did not receive a reaction from the audience, she started to berate the crowd with insults, according to Montoya.
“She proceeded to curse out everybody in the room from the stage,” Montoya said. “She basically said ‘F— you guys, seriously, like f— all of you.’”
According to Montoya, the four left Hollywood Comedy as soon as Sunday finished her set, but before leaving Demitra confronted the host one last time and said he was being rude to them.
“I didn’t really exchange words with her,” Montoya said. “I just told her to have a great day and sorry that they had a bad experience.”
Montoya informed his manager about what happened after the video was uploaded to their channel and she sent apology messages to each of them. In the video, the Kalogeras Sisters said they felt disrespected by staff and attacked by the comics in the audience.
“I wouldn’t wish that comedy club on my worst enemy,” Demitra said in the video.
The following day, the club’s Yelp page started to get one-star reviews and the club owner, an Asian woman, and host, a Japanese Mexican American, were flooded with hate messages, racist and sexist reviews and death threats sent directly to them, according to documents obtained by The Times.
“[The video’s] definitely one-sided and there’s a lot of edits and just a lot of parts that weren’t really well documented from our perspective,” Montoya said.
Since the harassment started, Montoya said he has had to filter his Instagram messages to only show those from the people he follows. As for Summers, who is pregnant, she said the incident has “triggered preexisting serious health issues.”
Hollywood Comedy club sent the Kalogeras Sisters a cease-and-desist notice, ordering the sisters to take down the video.
“Clearly, the Kalogeras were not interested in an apology. They got what they wanted … ‘content’ that they could exploit for clicks,” stated the cease and desist.
Summers also released a statement on the club’s page. On Jan. 30, the sisters responded through their lawyer, denying wrongdoing and issuing a cease-and-desist order to Summers, demanding that she stop posting about the sisters and issue a public apology.
“The HCC has instigated a battle with the Kalogeras Sisters fan base, who retaliated in kind and defended themselves against the hate-filled comments and threats directed against them,” according to documents obtained by The Times. “None of those comments can be held against the Kalogeras Sisters.”
The Times reached out to the sisters, who declined to comment on the situation. Summers has banned the sisters from both of her clubs.
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