By Michelle Garcia and Claretta Bellamy -
NBC News
A woman who gained notoriety on the Internet after reporting that a man attacked her with a brick outside a club in Houston, Texas, was charged this Wednesday with felony theft after raising more than $40,000 with an online donation campaign.
Roda Osman, 33, faces charges of theft by deception but has not been arrested because police do not know her whereabouts.
In September, after an alleged altercation outside a club, she alleged on social media that she was attacked by a man who hit her with a brick after she rejected his advances.
The post, which included no evidence of her alleged attack, went viral and sparked online debates about whether or not her story was credible.
According to Harris County Prosecutor's Office documents obtained by NBC News, police responded to an incident in September in which Osman claimed an unknown man hit her in the face with a brick because she refused to give him her phone number.
She also said that she got into a car she believed was an Uber, and that the driver tried to kidnap her.
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Weeks later, the detective who wrote an affidavit for the District Attorney's Office reviewed surveillance footage from the moments before the incident.
In the video, Osman is seen with a friend and then with the person she identified as the man who attacked her.
They are seen getting in and out of a car, and according to the detective, the images show the young woman slapping the man and when he hits her back with a bottle in his hand.
The campaign, now deleted, on the GoFundMe platform.GoFundMe
"We believe that's what left the mark on his face," Keith Houston of the District Attorney's Office told NBC News affiliate KPRC in Houston.
"But it was mutual aggression," he said.
A friend who was with Osman the night of the altercation told police she did not believe she had been hit with a brick, according to prosecutors.
However, the first publication about the incident on social networks led to the creation of a campaign on the GoFundMe platform, which has since been deactivated, which accumulated more than a thousand donations totaling at least $42,000.
"GoFundMe has zero tolerance for misuse of our platform and cooperates with law enforcement investigations into those accused of wrongdoing," a GoFundMe spokesperson said in a statement.
"The campaign has been removed, all donors have been refunded and Roda Osman is banned from using the platform in the future for any campaign," he added.
Osman created another GoFundMe campaign in 2020 in which she claimed that she had been assaulted by a private security guard in Minneapolis, leaving her with a black eye, bruises on her face and injuries to her leg, according to the indictment.
The campaign sought to raise at least $5,000 to pay for Osman's medical and legal expenses.
It's unclear how much money he got;
that campaign has also been removed from GoFundMe.
A friend who stayed with Osman in Minneapolis said the allegations were lies and he didn't "want to know anything about it," according to court documents.
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"I have things to do in my life," Osman wrote Wednesday on the social network Instagram, cited by KPRC.
"I have real ways to make money and I don't need a GoFundMe campaign. I can make money because I'm educated and talented," she said.
NBC News attempted to contact Osman via text message but he has not responded.
A Houston police spokesperson referred any questions to the District Attorney's Office and asked that "anyone with information regarding her whereabouts contact the Harris District Attorney's Office or the Houston Police Department."