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.
I understood your message
Blah blah blah we don’t know she’s a racist because weh weh weh random bullshit about missing context.
Yes we do. She’s a racist shitbag. The context is her being a racist shitbag writing a racist shitbag post on social media. The post has been displayed on various news sources and visible to anyone with a passing interest in the subject.
Her only remorse is that her casual racism turned out to be exposed to the public and the racist in chief is putting the spotlight on her racist shitbaggery.
