The woman behind an early Facebook post that helped spark baseless rumors about Haitians eating pets told NBC News that she feels for the immigrant community.
The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.
Her post is incredibly racist hearsay from 3 people removed (her neighbor’s daughter’s friend). It describes a vile act that casts fault on 20k people in her local community.
Shes expressing remorse because she did something vile and racist and now has everyone in the world looking at her and her actions.
She doesn’t have anything to gain like Trump/Vance, so shes afraid she will have consequences in her life now that her racism and hate is so public. After the multiple days of bomb threats that have cleared local schools and city Hall, the fear has set in.
That’s it. She didn’t apologize out of a sense of decency or remorse. Her apology is:
“Well I’m biracial and gay, so I can’t be racist.”
“I also didn’t realize this hate would go national, and now that the world is attacking these people and might attack me, I realize what I did was wrong.”
“I’m so scared what I did will affect me, please don’t let it.”
That’s not remorse. That’s someone running from the ugly thing they did, hoping to escape any consequence.
Agreed.
This sounds more like “sorry I got caught” than “I acknowledge it was wrong to have thought or said that”.