Kelly Clarkson should have her phone taken away

The Zapruder tape of the attempted assassination of Art Of Play is out. And a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist released it.

On Wednesday, investigative sports journalist Pablo Torre unveiled the security footage of what happened on that fateful day, October 10, 2026, when Kelly Clarkson posted a nasty comment about the store to her almost 9 million followers. Torre and his crew admitted they were Art of Play patrons, so it’s not a big leap that the store gave the video to him. As a matter of fact, at the end of his show, Torre unveils he bought the other less expensive bird that Clarkson passed up for $2,000 and proclaims it the new show mascot.

The five minutes of silent footage, taken from two different indoor cameras, shows Clarkson dressed like every other Brooklyn-ite in the store, having a very brief civil conversation with a shopkeeper about the automaton bird, walk away to view a completely different item, ignore the shopkeeper’s efforts to gain back her attention, and then snarl something across the store as she exited, much to the bewilderment of everybody there.

It doesn’t resemble anything like the “Pretty Woman” scene Clarkson described in which call girl Julia Roberts gets tossed out of a Rodeo Drive boutique because she looks too trashy.

What it did look like was a spoiled rich personality who couldn’t buy her desired object because it wasn’t for sale, and in a fit of immaturity, unleashed a massive horde of crazed lemmings on a little Brooklyn store.

Celebrities should never pick on a small business. Ever.

The power of famous people is unimaginably larger than life, like comparing the Avengers to gym teachers who break up a hall fight. Clarkson didn’t become a household name yesterday. She’s been “America’s Sweetheart” since appearing on the first season of “American Idol” in 2002. She knows the power she wields. If Delta lost your luggage, JPMorgan made the wrong trade, or Facebook allowed impersonators to create accounts in your name, feel free to vent your wrath toward the billion dollar global behemoths that did you wrong. But a singular gift shop in Brooklyn with maybe 6 or 7 employees? That’s like using a howitzer to kill an ant. At a hastily assembled press conference the day before the security footage leaked, co-owner Adam Rubin gave a brutal account of what the wrath of Clarkson’s tweets unleashed: employees receiving death threats, doxxing of the business next door, a landslide of bad Yelp reviews, and one feverish guy who barged into the store, accusing the owners of “racial profiling. ”One of Rubin’s statements traveled far and wide in the press, and even became The Wall Street Journal’s quote of the day: "Kelly Clarkson put us in danger.”

The ball is now in Clarkson’s court. If she is smart, she should bury the hatchet, and let somebody else handle her X account before she has another bad day and causes more collateral damage.