Did Dakota Johnson Lock People in a Cafe? An Investigation

Photo: Alessio Botticelli/GC Images

Dakota Johnson: Actress, celebrity daughter, famous bangs-haver, citrus fibber, truth-sayer, and … hostage-taker? Perhaps. Johnson has been in the news lately for her recent roles in critically lauded projects The Lost Daughter and Am I OK?, which means that her infamous Architectural Digest tour has resurfaced on TikTok. On Sunday, a Twitter user with the handle @biz_socks quote-tweeted the lime video with a Dakota anecdote he claimed to affirm the “pure chaos she radiates”: “True story: Dakota Johnson once locked me and my Mom inside a Blue Bottle Coffee shop because the barista told her she couldn’t make the coffee herself.”

This sounds like the sort of far-fetched story that stan Twitter sometimes likes to make up, but @biz_socks didn’t signal that he was joking, and it only got stranger when he followed up with what appears to be evidence of Dakota Johnson handling the door to a Blue Bottle Coffee location, writing that she “closed the door on all of us who were still inside, pulled a rope out of her bag, tied the doors shut, and walked away. We had to have a passerby untie the rope so we could get out.”

Based on this photo alone, there’s still an opportunity for Johnson to say “that’s not true, Ellen.” The pic doesn’t show her actually shutting the door or tying the rope. There aren’t any viral videos of the incident floating around. But last October, a staff member who worked at the same Blue Bottle tweeted their own claim about Johnson, “one time she came into my coffee shop at milk studios at like 11am, walked behind the counter and started pretending that she was making drinks while her people tied the front doors shut from the outside and started filming her … Customers were trapped inside.” The details of the alleged incident vary slightly, but overall, it’s an eerily similar anecdote. And the location in the @biz_socks picture looks like the exterior to Milk Studios, where there was indeed a now-defunct Blue Bottle location, on 15th Street in Chelsea. Things were getting spooky.

So what is the truth? I reached out to @biz_socks, who turned out to be a New Yorker named L.J. (he asked for his last name not to be used) who had been trying to make sense of this bizarre celebrity encounter “for six years!” Before we spoke on the phone, he suggested that Johnson’s take-no-prisoners approach to the latte arts might have had something to do with a video the actress made for her January 2017 Vogue cover story. It was filmed at Milk Studios, and at the 1:07 mark, Johnson wears the same floral Gucci dress seen in the Blue Bottle photo.