Support truly
independent journalism
Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.
Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.
Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.
Louise Thomas
Editor
Brooke Schofield has issued an apology after resurfaced tweets showed the influencer defending George Zimmerman over the death of Trayvon Martin.
The TikTok star – who co-hosts the popular Cancelled podcast with Tana Mongeau – shared a nearly four-minute video to the platform on August 3, in which she addressed the racially insensitive tweets posted between 2012 and 2015. In the clip, a tearful Schofield described her past opinions, specifically regarding the death of the unarmed Black teenager, who was fatally shot by Zimmerman in 2012, as “disturbing,” “wrong,” “horrible,” and “disgusting.”
Schofield attempted to explain her “mindset at the time” she made the tweets, noting that her “parents were addicts” and she was adopted by her grandparents around age 10. “As is true for a lot of grandparents, they’re a little bit less progressive than a lot of us are now,” she said.
The influencer said that her grandfather was “ring-wing conservative” and “the only thing ever that I had been exposed to” were conservative political commentators and news outlets. “I just should have known better,” Schofield said. “Sometimes you have these people that you put on a pedestal, and you think everybody older than you is smarter than you and knows everything and they do not.”
She acknowledged that “it wasn’t until after college” that she began to “shift” her way of thinking. While Schofield apologized for not addressing the tweets sooner, she explained that she thought it would cause more harm to bring them to light again.
“I’m very, very sorry to anybody who is hurt by the tweets because, obviously, they are very hurtful,” Schofield concluded the video. “That is not how I think, that is not what I believe and I am 27 years old now. I’ve had so much time to learn and grow and formulate my own opinions and they are nothing like they were when I was 17-18 years old.”
Earlier this week, a number of past racially insensitive tweets made by Schofield resurfaced after they were published by the popular celebrity gossip account, PopCrave. In a string of posts, Schofield argued that the death of Martin at the hands of Zimmerman, who was then a member of the Florida community’s neighborhood watch, wasn’t the result of racial profiling.
“Guarantee if Zimmerman shot a white guy, this wouldn’t even be a story,” she tweeted on July 14, 2013. “News flash this wasn’t a crime of racism it was self defense.”
Zimmerman killed Martin on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, while the unarmed teenager was on his way to a convenience store to buy snacks. He claimed he had fired his gun in self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground law,” and was later acquitted on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Martin’s death, along with those of several other innocent Black men and women, inspired thousands of protesters to take to the streets through the Black Lives Matter movement.
In another resurfaced tweet originally posted in March 2015, Schofield said: “I said so many accidentally racist things last night I don’t know how I even made it back to America.”
The influencer recently rose to internet fame for her viral 16-part TikTok series about her ex-boyfriend, musician Clinton Kane, in which she alleged that he faked being Australian and lied about the death of his mother. A representative for Kane later told People that they had a” brief, three-month relationship over two years ago” and Schofield’s “recent comments regarding Kane are untrue.”
