The owner of a vacation villa advertising a private beach apologized Friday for a melee caught on videotape, where her tenant attempted to eject innocent beachgoers from “private property.” The villa owner also acknowledged discriminatory language on the property website — but had explanations for both offenses.

The video shows a woman in denim shorts and a Texas flag-themed bikini top exclaiming that the beach is private and the woman filming her needs to leave.

The person filming is heard explaining that all Virgin Islands beaches are public.

“No ma’am, they’re not. You can go to a public beach at Magens Bay,” the woman says, hands on her hips, mirrored aviator sunglasses shining.

“Fifty years I’ve lived here,” the woman filming responds in a level tone.

“Congratulations. That’s great. This is private property,” the woman snaps, her voice starting to quiver.

Like many similar videos, the nearly one-minute clip ends with the complaining woman calling the police.

The video, shared widely on social media Wednesday, elicited hundreds of comments, many concerned about misinformation fed to some visitors by mainland landowners renting out Virgin Islands properties. All Virgin Islands beaches are public up to the high water mark.

The complaining woman had rented The Beach House, a secluded villa on remote Mail Beach, for her honeymoon, property owner Annette Elliot said Friday. Being one of St. Thomas’ lesser-known stretches of sand, tucked between Caret Bay and Neltjeberg Bay, an uninformed off-island visitor might be forgiven for assuming it was private — even if it hadn’t been expressly written in advertisements for the villa.

Elliot, who bought the property with her then-husband about a decade ago, said she was unsure why advertisements for The Beach House listed the beach as private. She suggested a previous owner may have written it. Copyright information lists it as being created in 2015 and updated in 2025.

Elliot did, however, accept responsibility for another statement about the villa that has caused outrage.

Listings for the eight-bedroom home on Airbnb, Vrbo, Tripadvisor, Travelocity, Vacation Cottage, and elsewhere included the sentence, “We do not rent to locals.”

The websites did not define who was considered a “local,” but the statement appeared to directly violate VI Code sections covering unlawful discriminatory practices.

The language has since been removed from individual websites, but search engines, which can be slow to adapt to webpage changes, still list The Beach House as having a private beach and unwilling to rent to “locals.”

Elliot, who lives in Virginia, said her ex-husband had added the no-locals clause after renting to Virgin Islanders who threw a raucous two-day party that attracted hundreds, damaged a cistern, disturbed neighbors, and left an ungodly mess. She said it wasn’t meant to discriminate against anyone and that she’d rented to locals for weddings and other events in recent years.

“I’m sorry that happened, and I don’t know why that happened,” Elliot said of the beach incident. “Everybody’s on a different page, and everybody’s all outraged because of our renter.”

She blamed the incident, in part, on nearby rental properties encouraging their visitors to traverse down to the beach either via a dangerous gut or by using her property’s stairs. She said the route passes by The Beach House’s kitchen window, a shower, and a closed gate.

“There’s a huge cliff and there’s the boulders,” Elliot said. “People walk down through the actual property, push through the gate, walk right down to the house, to the steps. You’re very obviously on a property. You can look and see it’s a kitchen.”

Elliot worried she may be held liable if someone got hurt attempting to reach the beach via her property.

“I don’t care if they’re on the beach, you know, but they can’t go through that gut,” she said. “They could really get hurt.”

The Beach House was not the first Virgin Islands property to falsely advertise a private beach. In 2019, the legislature heard testimony of myriad properties falsely claiming a private beach, leaving some vacationers vocally disappointed. A 2020 video appeared to show a woman attempting to deny beach access to several men, going so far as to claim they had threatened her life.

Debate about what the Virgin Islands Open Shoreline Act means is also nothing new.

Title 12, Chapter 10 of the VI Code reads: “No person, firm, corporation, association or other legal entity shall create, erect, maintain, or construct any obstruction, barrier, or restraint of any nature whatsoever upon, across or within the shorelines of the United States Virgin Islands as defined in this section, which would interfere with the right of the public individually and collectively, to use and enjoy any shoreline.”

Concerned citizens have written to the Source since at least 2003, worried that the letter of the law and common practice can be two different things.

In 2024, a group of St. Croix residents sued new property owners who had allegedly placed boulders at what they described as a traditional beach access point.

Until very recently, a St. John vacation rental advertised as having a private beach. The villa’s new owners removed the “private beach” language. Reached Saturday, the villa’s former owner said she meant the word private to mean rarely-visited and out of public view — not that it was private property.

Adding to potential confusion, former renters leaving reviews often boast of a villa’s “private beach” rather than a beach with privacy. The owners of Sand Dollar Estate list the beach in front of their Peterborg property as “secluded,” not private. Multiple reviewers online don’t bother with the distinction.

Bending or breaking rental housing rules is not new in the territory. Federal law protects renters who receive Section 8 housing assistance from discrimination, yet the practice is not uncommon, especially in privately listed homes.

A self-listed two-bedroom, one bathroom home for rent in Estate Catherine’s Rest recently advertised as not allowing Section 8 tenants, as did another in Mt. Pleasant. Professional realty organizations like Coldwell Banker and others have had listings barring Section 8 renters, perhaps by accident.

All professionally listed rental properties go through a central database meant to catch discrimination, but some slip by, realtors in the territory said.

Christine Belmonte, an agent with St. Thomas-based Real Solutions, said realtors were on the lookout for discriminatory listings.

“When we do see stuff like this, we report it,” Belmonte said.

Whether by accident, negligence, or subterfuge, not all property managers are particularly careful with their rental listings’ language. The manager of a St. John vacation rental advertising a “solar heated pool” some years ago was unaware that the statement implied solar panels electrically heated the pool. She meant the statement to mean the pool — like everything else in Earth’s solar system — was heated by the sun.