US election: Springfield woman who started pet-eating claims says she is 'not racist'

A woman who wrote a Facebook post about Haitian immigrants eating local pets has said she is now filled with regret after it spiralled into a national frenzy.

Erika Lee, a resident of Springfield, Ohio, posted online about a neighbour’s cat going missing and said she had been told the cat was a victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbours.

She was one of the first people to post the rumour online, according to NewsGuard, a media watchdog that monitors misinformation.

Ms Lee’s post became part of a rumour mill that sparked a feeding frenzy, with the baseless claims being repeated by presidential hopeful Donald Trump during an election debate with Kamala Harris, and also by his running mate JD Vance on other occasions.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Ms Lee told Sky’s partner organisation, NBC News.

“I’m not a racist,” she said, adding that she and her daughter are of ethnically diverse backgrounds and she is a member of the LGBTQ community.

“Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”

The neighbour Ms Lee cited in her post, Kimberley Newton, told NewsGuard that the post had misstated her story.

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Other posts that contributed to the false allegations included 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. A woman who allegedly did kill and try to eat a cat was found to have been from Canton, Ohio, and had no links to the Haitian community.

Local police and city officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence pets are being eaten in Springfield, but that hasn’t stopped the claims spreading across the country.

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Anti-immigrant fervour has led to school closures in Springfield, as officials received bomb threats.

Ms Lee said she never imagined her post would become fodder for conspiracy theories and hate. She said there are real problems in the city, which was caught off-guard by a population boom when a rising number of migrants arrived.

“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield,” she said, adding that she has pulled her daughter out of school amid concerns for her safety.

And immigrant advocacy groups have said these kinds of claims can be dangerous.

“The Haitian-American community in Springfield, Ohio, and around the country is feeling targeted and unsafe because dehumanising, debunked and racist conspiracies are being advanced at the highest levels of American politics and are still being repeated,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a non-profit organisation that advocates for immigration reform told NBC News.

“The false claim that black immigrants are violently attacking American families by stealing and eating their pets is a powerful and old racist trope that puts a target on people’s backs, and it is turbo-charged in the era of MAGA [the make America great again slogan used by Donald Trump] when political violence has become commonplace and we have already witnessed violent incidents incited by such rhetoric.”