The Springfield, Ohio woman who first spread the unfounded claim on social media that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating locals' pets says she is very sorry and never meant to harm the Haitian community.
“It suddenly became something I didn't want,” Erica Lee said. told NBC News on Friday night.
Lee was not directly aware of any such incidents involving Caribbean immigrants when he recently posted on Facebook about a lost cat that his neighbor believed had been killed and eaten by a Haitian resident of the city.
He posted, “My neighbour told me that her daughter's friend's cat is lost…” According to NewsGuardIt is a media watchdog that tracks misinformation online.
“One day she came home from work, as she got out of her car, she looked over at a neighbor’s house where Haitians live, and she saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you hang a deer for slaughter, and they were cutting him up to eat,” Lee said.
That neighbor, Kimberly Newton, told NewsGuard that she actually heard the story not from her daughter, but from an acquaintance. According to the outlet, a screenshot of the now-deleted post reached X from Facebook on September 5 and metastasized.
Lee, 35, said she never expected the post would “reach beyond Springfield,” let alone shine a national spotlight on the small town of about 60,000 as rumors about President Donald Trump spiraled out of control. Repeated claims During a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump's fellow candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has also repeated the false allegations.
“I'm not a racist,” an emotional Lee told NBC News, adding that her daughter is half-Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community.
“Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that wasn’t my intention.”
Several other posts have also contributed to the massive spread of misinformation, including a viral photo man holding a dead swan — which turned out to be from Columbus, Ohio. And a video of a woman who allegedly tried to kill a cat and eat it — which occurred in Canton, Ohio, and has no connection to the Haitian community.
Police and city officials have repeatedly rejected that such a crime occurred in Springfield.
Many schools and municipal offices in Springfield, home to about 20,000 Haitian immigrants, remained closed for the second consecutive day on Friday due to bomb threats resulting in national media attention.
“I feel sorry for the Haitian community,” Lee told NBC. “If I was in Haitians' shoes, I would be scared too, I would be worried that someone would come after me because they thought I was hurting something they loved and again, I wasn't trying to do that.”
