A lot of the coverage following Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has scrutinized his baseless assertion that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
In the days leading up to the debate, conservative commentators had been making the claim but without any evidence. They included conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who was in Pennsylvania and New York City on Wednesday as a guest of Trump’s during his travel on Patriot Day.
Shortly after the debate concluded, Trump went on Truth Social and posted a video that appeared to be an attempt to justify the claim, which ABC News moderator David Muir had fact-checked live.
Donald Trump debates Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Trump claimed without evidence during the debate that animals were being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The Claim
A Wednesday post by Trump on Truth Social included a screen grab from another post on the platform by user @GeneralMCNews, which said, “BREAKING: An Ohio woman has allegedly killed and eaten a cat in front of shocked neighbors.”
The video included what looked like police bodycam footage. In the footage, someone asks, “What did you do? Why did you kill the cat?”
Also, a woman in the video is asked, “Did you eat that cat?” People in the background say that she ate the animal.
The Facts
The video Trump shared has been misused and is not linked to the false rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield.
The footage was taken from an incident in mid-August in Canton, Ohio. Allexis Telia Ferrell, 27, was arrested and later charged with cruelty to companion animals following reports that she had killed and eaten a cat.
Court records filed by the Canton Police Department do not say that Ferrell is an immigrant. She has multiple charges going back seven years, according to online filings. She is set to appear for a competency hearing on October 14, following a “motion for evaluation of mental condition” earlier this month.
A Canton Police Department spokesman told the Miami Herald the department had no reason to believe that Ferrell was not a U.S. citizen.
“She has lived in Canton for quite some time, for sure since she was a juvenile,” the spokesman said.
The video Trump shared was later appropriated and misused to claim that Haitian migrants were eating animals in Springfield, Ohio. Truth Social user @GeneralMCNews, whose content Trump shared, has posted other misleading material, including conspiratorial claims about COVID-19, one of which Newsweek debunked earlier this week.
Although the incident in the video did take place in Ohio and the video Trump shared does not specifically identify Springfield or Canton, it is misleading in the context of his comments from the debate in which he mentioned Springfield.
Newsweek has contacted via email a Trump spokesperson for comment.
Trump said he outperformed Harris in the debate while also saying “everybody at ABC Fake News” should be fired. He said he was unfairly fact-checked by Muir and fellow moderator Linsey Davis.
The former president was fact-checked five times during the debate, while Harris was never fact-checked.
The Ruling
Misleading material
The video posted by Trump is from an incident filmed in August in which an Ohio resident was accused of abusing an animal and arrested. Police said they had no reason to believe the resident was not a U.S. citizen.
The video was filmed in Canton, Ohio, not Springfield, and has been misappropriated to support baseless claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team
