“This isn’t about gossip, it’s about asymmetric social warfare,” a shopkeeper at Art of Play, in Brooklyn, tells me before going back to helping people play with various adult toys.

It’s Tuesday night at the “curiosity shop” on the border of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, one block from a $39,500/year Montessori preschool that recently went viral for teachers’ Issey Miyake-inspired uniforms.

The store isn’t consistently mobbed, but every hour or so it’s briefly crowded with press. (I was there when a German influencer (?) started filming a video, waving around massive prop dollar bills.) Neighbors stop by to show solidarity (“I’ve always loved you guys” and “I think Kelly was out of line!”). Workers from the Afghan bakery around the corner come through with free baked goods in a pie box. The owners of Buzzy, a neighborhood cannabis dispensary, drop off some free weed stuff.

We are being “literally attacked,” a store manager tells a patron.

Let me tell you why I’m spending an otherwise normal Tuesday evening at Art of Play. Saturday, Kelly Clarkson, the Grammy-winning popstar and former talk show host, tweeted to her 8.8 million followers that the store treated her like she was poor. The store then explained, on Instagram, that Clarkson wanted to buy “Molly,” a “one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird” that is “not for sale.” Clarkson countered with screenshots of a $15,000 price tag, alleging she was told, in a “condescending tone,” that the bird “is for sale but it costs $15,000, so if you’d like me to find something comparable for you, I can.”

Tuesday, co-owner Adam Rubin told TMZ the celebrity “used her platform to squash us like a bug”; he says they’ve received death threats and that neighbors have been doxxed. “Kelly Clarkson has put us in danger,” Rubin told New York Magazine.

When I was hanging out in the store near closing — just me, one of the co-owners (a professional magician, obviously), and a manager, Hal — I was told what happened Saturday, from their perspective.