Erica Winchester, the racist, Volvo-crashing rageaholic caught on tape berating and slapping a postal worker, has been placed under police protection from the Internet rage machine. Meanwhile, the mail carrier she abused speaks out.

Police in Hingham, Mass. say Winchester has received harassing and threatening phone calls since the video went viral earlier this week, and "because of the attention this has gotten in the media, we feel she needs to have protection." Hopefully they're all black cops.

As Winchester hunkers down and tries to throw prank callers off by pretending her house is a pizza parlor, more details are emerging about that fateful encounter on October 13th, 2009. The mail carrier who was the target of Winchester's tirade is 47-year-old Hugston Jean, and in an interview with the Hingham Journal he said Winchester actually gave him permission to film her on his phone. "When I picked up my cell phone, she said she did not care if I videotaped her." This is clearly a woman who doesn't understand how the Internet works.

When Jean told his bosses at the post office about the incident, they notified the police who say Jean declined to press charges against Winchester at the time. But after seeing the video, police decided to charge her with assault and battery and committing a hate crime anyway, and to dismiss the charges after a year if she didn't get in any more trouble.

In the caption to the original YouTube video, Jean claimed he was fired from his temporary position as a mail carrier because of the incident. The US Postal Service now denies this: "Let me assure you that the employee's job status has nothing whatsoever to do with the video," said a spokeswoman. But Jean told the Hingham Journal he was fired because the USPS "did not want to get involved in this assault."

Clearly the USPS just needs to find a video of Jean being racist, post it to YouTube and this whole thing will straighten itself out.

Previously

Postal Worker Secretly Films Customer's Racist Rant
Meet the Volvo-Driving Racist Mailman Harasser