I didn’t want to cause problems, regrets the author of the rumor about Haitians eating cats

The new connections come a week after former US President Donald Trump and his allies made unsubstantiated claims about eating dogs and cats a campaign issue. According to the media, the rumor about Haitian immigrants, for which Springfield authorities say there is no evidence, also began to spread based on a post in a Facebook group for residents of the city. He was talking about a cat from a house in the neighborhood, which Haitians used to cut up for food.

According to the NYT, it was written by a certain Erika Leeová, who heard that the neighbors’ cat had disappeared and that an immigrant from Haiti might have taken it. But when she went to ask the neighbor about the matter, it turned out that the cat, which belongs to her daughter, had not disappeared. She learned that if something like this happened at all, then it was a pet belonging to a friend of a friend of the neighbor’s daughter. “At that moment, you are already playing silent mail,” Lee commented on the situation.

She deleted her post from Facebook and now expresses regret over the racially tinged controversy that engulfed her city. “I wasn’t raised with hate,” she said with tears in her eyes. “My whole family is racially mixed. I never wanted to cause problems for anyone,” the NYT quoted her as saying.

According to the NBC station, her neighbor Kimberley Newton now claims that the Facebook post was a misinterpretation of the story she told Lee. “I don’t know if I’m the most reliable source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton told NewsGuard, adding that the cat’s owner was possibly an “acquaintance of a friend” and that she heard about the alleged incident from the friend, who she learned about it again from “a source she had”. “I have no proof,” added Newton.

Nevertheless, the post found its way into the ecosystem of anti-immigration commentators on social networks, and about ten days ago, the claims about the Haitians began to be shared on accounts with millions of followers. At the beginning of last week, the politicians of the Republican Party seized him, and in a televised debate with tens of millions of viewers, Trump finally came up with his own version. “They eat dogs in Springfield! The people who came are eating cats!” said the ex-president, who in the election campaign portrays immigrants as a threat to the survival of the United States.

The story was also spread by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, whose team provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a Springfield resident claimed her cat may have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when the reporter visited the woman, she said that the cat returned after a few days. The woman added that she apologized to her neighbors.

In Springfield, where almost 60 thousand people lived before, in recent years around 15 thousand immigrants from Haiti – a country that is in the midst of a political crisis and problems with armed gangs – have settled. Immigrants from this poor Caribbean country are entitled to temporary protection in the US, and many headed to the city in southwestern Ohio because of job vacancies and relatively cheap housing. Local businesses praise the new workforce, but the significant increase in population also causes problems in the city.

After the developments from the beginning of last week, the media are multiplying the statements of Haitians who state that they are afraid and that they face harassment in Springfield. At the same time, the city was hit by a wave of threats of bomb attacks, due to which schools and administrative buildings had to be repeatedly evacuated. All previous reports about planted explosives turned out to be false.

The authorities have registered over 30 such threats in the last week, the AP agency reported. According to Governor Mike DeWine’s office, the investigation showed that the “vast majority” of these messages came from abroad. DeWine did not name specific countries, and according to the AP, the authorities did not specify how investigators determined the foreign origin of the messages.