Source of Trump’s Dog-Eating Immigrants Claim Unmasked
The social media user who posted what appears to be one of the first claims of Haitian migrants kidnapping and eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor—who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else, according to a new report.
The fourth-hand claim about a dead cat rocketed to national prominence when Donald Trump mangled it during his Tuesday night debate with Kamala Harris, claiming, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Reporters from NewsGuard, a company that works to counter online misinformation, tracked down the poster, a Springfield woman named Erika Lee, 35, who admitted to being the source of the Facebook rumor that traveled from her keyboard to Trump in just a matter of days. But Lee said she had not actually witnessed the story—concerning a cat found hung from a tree for butchering.