Did the Los Angeles Police Department charge "Daniel Reed" for sexual harassment for grabbing "Jessica Moore" to pull her back from the path of a speeding car? No, that's not true: The video showing a man grabbing a woman before she is hit by a car is from a 2020 incident in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Instagram video that carries the false claim mixes in publicly available video not related to the Cincinnati incident. The man in the real case is named Criss Allen and he was not arrested by Los Angeles police for sexual harassment.
The claim appeared in an October 24, 2025 video posted on Instagram account @goldenpathwayimmigration (archived here). It opened with a voice on the video saying:
A man saved a woman who was on the verge of being hit by a car, but was charged with sexual harassment because he made inappropriate contact with her.
This is what the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at instagram.com/goldenpathwayimmigration.)
The video of the real incident was originally published in February 2020 on the YouTube account @CatersClips with the following details:
This is the moment a woman's life was saved by a vigilant passerby - as he pulls her back from the path of an oncoming car. Jacob Clouse had his dash cam running when it caught the life-saving act in Walnut Hills, Cincinnati on January 26. The footage sees a woman step in front of the car, not paying attention to potential traffic but the man, Jacob's neighbour, Criss, steps in at a critical moment. He pulls her back to the pavement and to safety as a car passes by just seconds after the incident.
The footage was then aired on the television show Inside Edition. Inside Edition spoke to Criss Allen, 25, who said that after he pulled the woman back from the car she said thank you and they went their separate ways. Inside Edition posted the video to their YouTube page on Feb. 7, 2020, some of which was used in the false Instagram video.
When the voice on the Instagram fake video says "surveillance footage later confirmed that his actions had prevented a major accident" what's shown isn't even from the same incident. The car in the video on Instagram clip has a long yellow license plate matching the layout of license plates of several countries in Europe, but not California's plates.
The woman in the Instagram fake is not wearing headphones while the woman in the first clip is wearing headphones on her ears as the screenshots below show:
The woman in headphones at the beginning of the video:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at YouTube.com/catersclips.)
And the woman later in the video posted on Instagram, without headphones by a car with the long yellow license plate:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post on Instagram account @goldenpathwayimmigration.)
Had a man named Daniel Reed been charged in Los Angeles for sexual harassment after saving a woman from being hit by a car, it would have been major news. Lead Stories searched Google News' index of thousands of news websites and found no reports that a man with that name had been charged in Los Angeles for sexual harassment after saving a woman from a car. Similarly, the Yahoo! News index of partner news sites and news services showed no legitimate news reports and only copies of the claim matching the made-up "Daniel Reed" clickbait story of a rescuer slapped with a sexual harassment charge.
The video posted on Instagram does not state when the incident occurred and Lead Stories reached out to the LAPD for comment and was told without a date they cannot search their records for any such incident.
