SPRINGFIELD, Ohio —The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

  • @[email protected]
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    fedilink
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    212 months ago

    Either she’s an idiot who doesn’t understand why it’s important to think before you speak, or she’s a racist who is trying to weasel out of a shitstorm of her own making.

    • @Brickhead92
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      72 months ago

      Well it’s not fair that she should have to suffer consequences for her own actions.

      /s