US woman behind pet-eating rumours spread by Trump admits claims are false

An Ohio woman whose Facebook post sparked harmful rumours about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield – accusations repeated by former President Donald Trump at Tuesday’s debate – has admitted the claims are false, saying she regrets how they have spiralled into a political frenzy.

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

Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker, said she had no actual first-hand knowledge when she took to a local Facebook group to pen a post about a missing pet. She wrote that her neighbour, Kimberly Newton, told her that “her daughter’s friend had lost her cat”.

“One day, she came home from work, as soon as she stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbour’s house, where Haitians live, and saw her cat hanging from a branch, like they’d do a deer for butchering and they were carving it up to eat,” read the since-deleted post, per screenshots shared online.

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