SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The woman whose hurtful and unfounded Facebook claims about Haitian immigrants eating local pets helped bring a small Ohio city to national attention says she had no firsthand knowledge of those incidents and is now filled with regret and fear in the aftermath.
“All of a sudden, it’s something that should never have happened,” Springfield resident Erica Lee told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat going missing, adding that a neighbor told her they thought the cat was the victim of an attack by a Haitian neighbor.
NewsGuard, a media watchdog that monitors online misinformation, found that Lee was one of the first people to post about the rumor on social media, with screenshots circulating online. NewsGuard reported that neighbor Kimberly Newton said she heard about the attack from a third party.
Newton told NewsGuard that Lee’s Facebook post misrepresented her story and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend,” not her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.
Lee said she never expected the post would become part of a viral saga and swirl in the national consciousness. She has since deleted the post from Facebook.
Other posts furthered false claims, such as a photo of a man holding a dead goose that was taken in Columbus, Ohio, and circulated online as evidence of the Springfield claim. A gory video of a woman who reportedly tried to kill and eat a cat was also filmed in Canton, Ohio, not Springfield, and turned out to have no connection to the Haitian community.
Local police and city officials have repeatedly insisted there is no evidence of such crimes in Springfield, but that hasn’t stopped the lie from spreading across the country and igniting a national furor that made its way onto the stage of this week’s presidential debates. Former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who was born less than an hour away from Springfield, have repeated the unfounded allegations.
Lee said she never imagined her post would spark conspiracy theories and fuel hate speech.
“I’m not a racist,” she said emotionally, adding that her daughter is half black and she herself is mixed race and part of the LGBTQ community. “Everyone seems to be turning it into a racist thing, but that was never my intention.”
Anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise in Springfield, with schools and City Hall closed on Thursday and Friday after city officials received bomb threats.
Lee said he pulled his daughter out of school and was concerned about her safety with so much attention on his family. He also said he was concerned about the safety of the Haitian community, but didn’t want to demonize them as a whole.
“I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I were in their shoes, I would be scared too. I would be scared that they would think I was hurting something they love and someone would sue me. Again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”
Immigrant advocacy groups say these kinds of claims can be dangerous.
“Haitian American communities in Springfield, Ohio, and across the country feel targeted and anxious as a dehumanizing, debunked, racist conspiracy is being pushed and repeated at the highest levels of American politics,” Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for immigration reform, said in an email. “The false claim that black immigrants are violently attacking American families for stealing and eating their pets is a powerful and old racist trope to target people, and it has only accelerated in the MAGA era, where political violence has become commonplace and we are already seeing violent incidents sparked by such rhetoric.”
Lee said very real problems related to Springfield’s population boom caught the beleaguered city off guard: Springfield was unprepared to handle the housing, health care and other service needs of the growing number of newcomers, many of whom are protected by federal law, who have been arriving since Haitians moved there over the past five years.
Still, she never imagined her Facebook post would spark national news.
“I never thought I’d make it past Springfield,” she said.
