Brooke Schofield faces backlash after resurfaced tweets show her defending Trayvon Martin’s killer

By Abby Amoakuh

Published Aug 7, 2024 at 12:35 PM

Reading time: 2 minutes

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Image courtesy of Brooke Schofield

Brooke Schofield, an influencer and co-host of the Cancelled podcast with Tana Mangeau, recently released a series of TikTok videos in which she apologised for a number of racist and homophobic tweets she posted when she was a teenager.

 

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Schofield explained that she wrote the tweets in question when she was between the ages of 15 and 18 years. The content has recently resurfaced and embroiled the influencer in controversy due to its highly problematic nature.

One of the fallouts of this situation has been Schofield’s brand partner, the clothing brand BoysLie, dropping the influencer as an ambassador in response to the online backlash. The company had an upcoming collab with the podcast host, which was scheduled to be released in just a few days. However, it indicated its intention to rethink the campaign in a recent statement citing that the brand understands “the severity and urgency behind addressing the concerns” of its audience regarding the project.

“We are in a weird position right now,” BoysLie noted. “We didn’t want to end the weekend without saying that we hear you, we see you, and we are adamantly working on a solution.”

T Mobile, another collaborator of the content creator, also broke ties with her.

Particularly offensive tweets included: “What do you call a Mexican baptism? A bean dip” and “I wish I didn’t have to dress like a dyke for work.”

The content creator also called some of her detractors “F*ggots” and shockingly labelled George Zimmerman’s shooting of 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin an act of “self-defence.” The incident sparked national outrage about the racial climate in the US and Zimmerman was subsequently prosecuted but ultimately acquitted of second-degree murder. Schofield also added that no one would care about the incident if Trayvon had been white. It conveyed that she had fundamentally misunderstood the larger social-political debate in which the shooting occurred.

On top of this, Schofield was found to have recently liked a picture featuring former President Donald Trump, casting her in an unflattering light, considering that her older tweets indicated support for Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.

In other words, the last two weeks were a really bad time to be Brooke Schofield.

In her apology video, Schofield responded to the backlash she had encountered: “You have probably seen the tweets that have been floating around. They are not fake. Those are real things that I said. I want to acknowledge that I feel the same way about them that you do. I think they are so disturbing. They’re wrong. They’re horrible and they’re disgusting.”

Schofield also tried to explain the regressive nature of some of her comments to her young, mostly progressive audience: “My parents were addicts, so I was adopted by my grandparents when I was like 10. As is true for a lot of grandparents, they’re a little bit less progressive than a lot of us are now.”

“I’m very very sorry to anyone who is hurt by the tweets because, obviously they are very hurtful. Sometimes you have these people that you put on a pedestal and you think everyone older than you is smarter than you and knows everything and they do not,” the podcaster said.

The content creator also proceeded to respond and apologise to people online who were commenting on some of her most controversial posts.

Further, Schofield claimed to have donated $10,000 to support the family of Trayvon Martin, the subject of one of her most contested tweets.

Nevertheless, Schofield’s efforts haven’t been well-received so far. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.