The Boys star Karen Fukuhara says she was assaulted on the street in anti-Asian hate crime

‘It came out of nowhere’

Karen Fukuhara, best known for her role in the Prime Video series The Boys, has claimed that she was randomly assaulted on the street.

The actor, who is an American of Japanese heritage, shared details of the alleged incident on Instagram, and described it as a hate crime.

“I rarely share about my private life but something happened today that I thought was important,” Fukuhara wrote. “I was walking to a café for some coffee and a man struck me in the back of my head. It came out of nowhere.

“We made no eye contact before, I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. It came to my surprise and my hat flew off,” she continued. “By the time I looked back, he was a few feet away from me (he must have kept walking after hitting me).”

Fukuhara said that she had thought about “confronting” her attacker but after he started walking towards her, she decided against the “risk”.

“After a few seconds of staring at each other, and him yelling at me, he eventually walked away,” she wrote.

“This is the first time I’ve been harmed physically, although racial slurs and hurtful actions have been directed to me in the past,” the actor said. “I write this, because I’ve had conversations with multi-racial friends of mine that had no idea these hate crimes happen to everyday, regular people – people they share meals with.”

Karen Fukuhara pictured in March 2022 (Getty Images for Variety)

Fukuhara, who is also known for her role as Katana in the 2016 DC Comics film Suicide Squad, added that she was making the post to “raise awareness”.

“Ultimately I know I got lucky,” she said. “He could have come back to hit me again. He could have carried a weapon. The shock of this experience has me thinking about taking self-defence classes. But why is this something we as ‘victims’ have to think about?”

Fukuhara concluded: “What satisfaction are these perpetrators getting from hitting women, Asians, the ELDERLY? They need to be held accountable.”

Other actors and followers reached out to Fukuhara to share support, sympathy and outrage over the alleged crime.

The Instagram post comes amid a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US.

In February, the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism published a study which suggested that anti-Asian hate crime had increased by 339 per cent in 2021 compared to the year before.