Subject: Woman Who Started the Pet-Eating Lie
...says, oops, my bad: just a misunderstanding.

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 said she heard the rumor from a neighbor, Kimberly Newton, who said she heard it from a friend of her daughter. Oh, wait, not a friend of her daughter but from “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend.

Um.

Other posts have also contributed to the false allegations, including a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio, but was spread by some online as evidence of the claims about Springfield. Graphic video of a woman who allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat was also found not to have originated in Springfield but in Canton, Ohio, and does not have any connection to the Haitian community.

Innocent mistakes, right?

No.

Racism, stoked by Trump and Vance.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...