An Ohio woman whose social media post led to the far-right anti-immigrant conspiracy theory alleging that Haitian migrants in Springfield are abducting and eating pets said it was all based on a rumor.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee told NBC News in an interview Friday. “I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield.”
In a since-deleted post on Facebook, Lee wrote that her neighbor’s cat went missing and she was told it was because the pet was attacked by a Haitian immigrant.
But Kimberly Newton, Lee’s neighbor, told media watchdog, NewsGuard, that she does not “actually know the person who lost the cat,” adding that the cat’s owner was “an acquaintance of a friend.”
Still, Lee’s story was amplified by right-wing influencers and politicians including Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, and even made its way onto the presidential debate stage this week, despite it being debunked by local police and city officials.
Now, Lee says she is filled with regret about how the story has unfolded and never imagined that a neighborhood rumor could become a source for anti-Haitian hate.
“I’m not a racist,” she told NBC News. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”
Lee added that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community.
“I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I was in the Haitians’ position, I’d be terrified, too, worried that somebody’s going to come after me because they think I’m hurting something that they love and that, again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”
Schools and municipal buildings were forced to close on Thursday and Friday after city officials received bomb threats amid the fallout from the local gossip.
“The Haitian-American community in Springfield, OH and around the country is feeling targeted and unsafe because dehumanizing, debunked and racist conspiracies are being advanced at the highest levels of American politics and are still being repeated,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for immigration reform told NBC News.
“The false claim that Black immigrants are violently attacking American families by stealing and eating their pets is a powerful and old racist trope that puts a target on people’s backs, and it is turbo-charged in the era of MAGA when political violence has become commonplace and we have already witnessed violent incidents incited by such rhetoric,” she added.
