Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
The Wendy's Finger Chili Scandal - The Anna Ayala story
08 Feb 2025
This is the story of Anna Ayala and how she attempted to scam Wendy's by putting a finger in the chili she was eating.
Full Episode
So one day this guy's at work and we'll just call him Digit. And Digit is operating a mechanical truck lift when suddenly his glove gets caught in the lift and he pulls and he struggles to pull it out. And that is when the machine comes down and slices his finger clean off. All right, but we'll get back to him. This story doesn't actually start with Digit. It starts with this woman, Ayala.
And one night Ayala is eating at Wendy's and she's eating chili and she takes a bite and she suddenly bites down onto something crunchy and she spits it out and she looks at it and it appears to be a human finger. And Ayala freaks the hell out. She starts yelling and telling everyone in the restaurant to stop eating because the food is contaminated.
And she's screaming at the staff and accusing them of tampering with the food. And the store, it immediately shuts down. And they discard the chili, but they save the finger. They actually put it in the freezer. And then they call the police, and the police come investigate. But they're like, this is more of a health code violation. This isn't really police jurisdiction.
But then three hours later, the story has already hit the local news. And then the news starts to spread. And then the next day, corporate representatives show up to the restaurant. Now, I don't know what Wendy's corporate representatives look like, so I'm just going to represent them like this.
So Wendy's corporate, they show up to the restaurant investigating because this is a PR nightmare for them. And they're immediately trying to figure out if what Ayala bit into is an actual human finger. It is. And they're trying to figure out whose finger it is. So they interview all the employees at the store. They contact suppliers at the factories. But none of them are missing a finger.
And within a week of this happening, Wendy's worst nightmare occurs. This story starts to blow up. It's all over the news. Late night talk show hosts are making jokes about it. Ayala gets invited onto Good Morning America to talk about what happened. And she eventually goes and she gets a lawyer and she files a lawsuit against Wendy's because she's about to catch a big paycheck from this.
Meanwhile, Wendy's is still trying to get to the bottom of this. They hire a forensics expert to test whether or not the finger was cooked with the chili or if it was added after the fact. And they determine it was added after the fact. They also find that there's actually no trace of Ayala's saliva on the finger, meaning she never bit into it. She lied.
So Wendy's has all this information and they're like, this has gotta be a hoax. So they contact the police with this new evidence. And then finally police get involved and they start investigating. And to assist this investigation, Wendy's sets up a free hotline and offers a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the actual owner of the finger.
And sure enough, people start calling in, giving them information. And within a week, they get over 300 calls with people making all kinds of wild claims. But one of those callers claims that they had done business with Ayala before and that she was involved in some kind of real estate fraud years ago. So police hear this and they really start digging into Ayala's past.
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