Woman who started “Haitians are eating cats” rumor is now worried about her daughter’s safety

The woman who started the baseless rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets – the rumor that Donald Trump cited at his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last week and that Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has been promoting online even though he admits that it’s a lie – defended her actions, saying that she can’t be racist because she’s a part of the LGBTQ+ community and her daughter is biracial.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” said Erika Lee, the woman who started the rumor on Facebook.

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In a Facebook post two weeks ago, Lee wrote that her neighbor’s cat went missing: “Warning to all about our beloved pets & those around us!!… My neighbor informed me that her daughters friend had lost her cat.”

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Lee wrote that her neighbor, Kimberly Newton, told her that her daughter’s friend had searched everywhere and then wrote that when Newton’s daughter’s friend came home from work one day, she looked at her Haitian neighbors’ house and “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 she was “told they are doing this to dogs” as well.

That post spread like wildfire among conservatives on social media. One of the Trump-Vance campaign’s major promises this election cycle is what Trump is calling the “largest deportation in history,” so stories – whether true or not – that portray immigrants in negative light are being spread as a way to convince people to vote for Trump.

Within days after Lee posted to Facebook, her story was being cited by Trump in his debate with Harris and Vance was arguing that it was true on social media, despite the lack of evidence other than Lee’s post and local authorities saying there have been no reported incidents of cats being kidnapped and eaten. Later in the week, the town was shutting down schools and municipal buildings due to bomb threats.

But now the story is falling apart. Newton told NewsGuard that she’s not “the most credible source becuase I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat” and that she didn’t hear about it from her daughter’s friend, like Lee said, but from a friend who heard about it from “a source that she had.”

“I don’t have any proof,” she said.

Lee has since deleted her Facebook post and she told NBC News that she didn’t mean for it to get so much attention.

“I’m not a racist,” she said. She said that her daughter is half-Black and that she is of mixed race as well and that she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community,” according to NBC News. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”

“I feel for the Haitian community,” she added, explaining that she pulled her daughter out of school becuase she’s worried for her safety. “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.”

“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield,” she said.

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