In the video, a woman berates the artist whose polarizing polychromatic work can be seen on outdoor sculptures and attention-grabbing suitcase designs in South Florida. She accuses the artist of disrespecting her staff before smashing his $5000 "Big Apple" sculpture to the ground.
The incident is making the rounds online again, but it first went viral nearly five years ago, in August 2020. At the time, Madelyne Sanchez, owner of Miami Beach Spanish restaurant Tapelia, did several interviews admitting to the outburst, and sharing that it happened three years prior to that, in 2017. Though some social media clout farms have shared the video without context this week, making it appear to be a recent incident, the footage is nearly eight years old.
According to the Art Newspaper, Sanchez alleged in a since-deleted video on the restaurant's Instagram page that Britto had visited her restaurant with friends and "asked for a discount, asked staff to turn off the music, asked staff not to speak, [and] humiliated them."
Brazilian newspaper Estadão asked Britto about the incident five years ago, after the footage spread online for the first time. In a lengthy statement, he confirmed the incident had occurred in 2017, adding, "Unfortunately, there are people who want to become famous at the expense of others. Through my art, my purpose has always been to bring joy, love, and hope to everyone. I do not tolerate disrespect, and never intended to disrespect anyone."
Still, the clip of Sanchez smashing Britto's sculpture refuses to die. It appears to have taken off again after the Instagram account @theurbanherald shared it five days ago, garnering more than 695,000 likes and nearly 14,000 comments. Three days later, Reddit user @ChompyRiley reposted it on r/interestingasfuck, a forum reserved for, well, "anything truly interesting as fuck," according to the subreddit's description. (Typically, that ranges from natural phenomena to technological feats to little-known historical events.) The video got nearly 55,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments on the platform. Since then, it's earned tens of thousands more views and comments on TikTok, Reels, and Threads.
Though it's five years old, Britto's statement to Estadão seems uncanny when one considers how many people have shared the video in 2025 without investigating its origins. "The internet is often unfair, and people are not concerned with the truth," he told the paper at the time. "They enjoy confusion, drama, negativity, and judging without analyzing the facts."
