Springfield Woman Behind FB Post That Sparked Pet-Eating Hysteria Speaks Out, Says She Has Regrets and Fears for Family’s Safety

The woman behind the Facebook post that helped spark the bizarre rant from Donald Trump at the ABC News presidential debate claiming Haitian immigrants are kidnapping and eating local pets in Springfield, Ohio spoke out this weekend, saying she regrets the post and is now in fear for her family’s safety.

Erika Lee spoke both to media watchdog group Newsguard and NBC News about the fallout from her post, which related a second-hand story from a neighbor about a cat going missing, and the neighbor’s belief it was Haitians in the neighborhood who were responsible.

A post on X/Twitter with a screenshot of Lee’s Facebook post went massively viral, reaching about 1 million views and the story took off from there, eventually making it to the presidential debate stage .

Screenshot via Twitter

Lee’s original post claimed the neighbor saw her daughter’s boyfriend’s cat, which had been missing, hanging from a tree in a Haitian neighbor’s yard.

“I’ve been told they are doing this to dogs, they have been doing it at Snyder Park with the ducks and geese,” she wrote.

Since then, a conspiracy theory about immigrants kidnapping and eating cats and dogs has become popular in far-right camps and was even pushed by former President Donald Trump in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris . Trump was fact checked after making the claim as town officials have repeatedly said there is no proof of the claim.

NewsGuard determined that Lee’s post had been one of the first online sources to make the claim, that the neighbor in question said Lee got it wrong.

Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.

Lee said she had no idea that it would become a national flashpoint. “It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” she told NBC News. She also denied there was a racial component.

Lee said she never imagined her post would become fodder for conspiracy theories and hate.

“I’m not a racist,” she said through heavy emotion, 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.”

Lee has pulled her daughter out of school out of fear for her safety due to the massive attention on the story. Multiple schools in Springfield were shut down this week due to threats being made that made hateful references to the Haitian population.

“I feel for the Haitian community,” Lee said. “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.”

Lee has deleted her original Facebook post and said she never expected it to spin into the divisive issue it has become.

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

Watch the clip above via NBC News .