The Springfield, Ohio woman whose social media post was among the first to spread a baseless claim of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating locals’ pets says she’s deeply regretful and never intended to cause harm to the Haitian community.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee told NBC News on Friday night.
Lee had no firsthand knowledge of any such incidents involving the Caribbean immigrants when she posted on Facebook recently about a missing cat that her neighbor reportedly believed was butchered and eaten by one of the city’s Haitian residents.
“My neighbor informed me that her daughters [sic] friend had lost her cat …,” she had posted, according to Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online.
“One day she came home from work, as soon as she stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbors house, where Haitians live, & saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat,” Lee added.
That neighbor, Kimberly Newton, told Newsguard that she had actually heard the story from an acquaintance, not her daughter. A screenshot of the since-deleted post made the leap from Facebook to X on September 5 and metastasized, according to the outlet.
Lee, 35, said she never expected the post to “get past Springfield,” let alone put a national spotlight on the small city of about 60,000 people as the rumor spiraled out of control after President Donald Trump repeated the claims during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has also echoed the false allegations.
“I’m not a racist,” Lee emotionally 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 was not my intent.”
Several other posts have contributed to the rampant disinformation, including a viral photo of a man holding a dead goose — which turned out to be from Columbus, Ohio. And a video of a woman who allegedly killed and tried to eat a cat — which happened in Canton, Ohio and has no connection to the Haitian community.
Police and city officials have repeatedly denied that anything such crimes had been committed in Springfield.
Several schools and municipal offices in Springfield, home to some 20,000 Haitian migrants, were closed for the second day in a row on Friday due to bomb threats as a result of the national media attention.
“I feel for the Haitian community,” Lee told NBC. “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.”
