Last week, several of our viewers had tagged me,
along with other TYT Network hosts on a Twitter thread about Rebekah Jones.
Now, Rebecca Jones tweeted that thread and for those of you who are unfamiliar with
her, or maybe forgot about who she is, she was the woman who claimed that
Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, had retaliated against her for refusing to
manipulate data about the number of COVID cases and deaths in the state.
We reported on that story at the time and we have some major corrections to make.
But before I get to that,
I want to talk about her Twitter thread from last week, and also,
more importantly, address why I refused to talk about her claims on the show.
Last week, Jones tweeted this.
My family is not safe.
My son has been taken on the governor's orders, and
I've had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety.
This is the reality of living in DeSantis' Florida.
There is no freedom here, only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king.
In a subsequent tweet she writes,
a week after we filed our lawsuit against the state, a kid claiming to be
the cousin of one of my son's classmates joined their snapchat group.
They recorded their conversations, and
anonymously reported my son to police for sharing a popular internet meme.
Wow.
I mean, that sounds pretty serious.
What was the popular internet meme?
Well, Jones shared it in her next tweet.
It's a man sleeping in a chair in a messy room with text reading,
cops in their car waiting for the school shooter to kill himself so they can go in.
Now, Jones also says that the authorities said they had to complete
a threat assessment since they received an anonymous complaint,
which both the local cops and the school signed off on as not being a threat.
Finally, Jones says that the state had essentially kidnapped her son.
And that Ron DeSantis was engaging in political retaliation, once again.
She tweeted that, an officer told me the state issued a warrant for
my son's arrest for, digital threats of terrorism.
I asked on whose orders.
The officer said it was the state.
They aren't letting him come home tonight.
They kidnapped my son.
These are obviously serious claims and even though we had covered stories
involving Jones on TYT that casted her in a positive light, I had recently come
across some information that made me pause on taking her claims at face value.
And I'm really happy that I did.
Jones unfortunately has a pretty tumultuous history,
especially on domestic matters.
In July of 2019, prior to the pandemic,
Jones had been charged with stalking a former boyfriend,
who happened to be a student of hers at Florida State University.
WUFT, which is an NPRPBS affiliate in Florida,
reported at the time that police said she published a 68-page document online
discussing private details of her relationship with her former boyfriend,
including explicit texts and nude photographs, and shared the link with him.
The two had sex in a classroom in 2017 when Jones was his
married professor at Florida State University, the man told police.
She was fired from the university after threatening to give a failing grade to
his roommates as revenge, he said.
Jones said the two had a six-month affair until October of 2017,
and the man is the father of her daughter born in July of 2018.
Now, according to police, Jones wrote in emails to the man,
quote, you're going to be famous.
We're going to destroy each other.
This is never going to end.
Jones was also charged with sexual cyber harassment, and cyber stalking in
the same incident, but prosecutors dropped those charges weeks later.
There were other issues too.
Jones was also previously charged in March of 2018 with felony robbery,
trespass and contempt of court for
violating a domestic violence injunction in cases involving the same ex-boyfriend.
But prosecutors also dropped those charges.
She was separately accused of kicking the door of the man's SUV in October of 2017,
but prosecutors decided to drop that case as well.
Now look, her past criminal charges do not necessarily mean that her
claims on Twitter were false or made up.
But, given the chaos in her private life,
I felt there was a possibility that we weren't getting the whole story.
I just didn't know for sure and I didn't feel comfortable simply regurgitating
her claims on this show, until I had some form of corroborating evidence.
But that evidence never came.
In fact, now it's become increasingly clear that her version of
events is not necessarily based in reality.
>> Multiple students contacted school resource officers,
law enforcement, and said they saw social media posts by her son
stating that he wanted to shoot up a school or do something like that.
And at least two images, allegedly from his snapchat, have come out.
This one, I'm feeling so silly, I might shoot up a building full of people,
and reaching for the officer's gun, me every time I see school security.
And it's more than just that.
These are at least allegedly statements that he had made over social media or
in chats with people.
Been three or four weeks since I got my neural antidepressants,
they're not really working.
I had no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school?
Teenager told one of his friends that he planned to shoot up to school on Thursday
after spring break.
There were too many things going on, so he postponed it until March 31st.
>> I just want to stop and give Tizzy a lot of credit for correcting the story
after he had originally taken Jones claims at face value.
Now, The Miami Herald also corrected their original reporting of the story ,sort of.
An updated article contained the headline, Son of Rebekah Jones,
Florida whistle blower, arrested in probe of threatening internet posts.
Why am I saying that The Miami Herald only partly corrected their inaccurate
reporting?
Because, believe it or not, I think we really need to call into question whether
Rebekah Jones should be considered a whistle blower in the first place.
Turns out that the narrative she pushed about being a brave data scientist
who just wanted to get people accurate COVID numbers, is not an open and
shut case after all.
Let's back up, and kind of remember what transpired in 2020.
So in 2020 Jones was working as a data scientist for
the Florida Department of Health.
Her role was to update the Coronavirus dashboard,
which indicated how many new COVID cases and deaths the state was dealing with.
In May of 2020, she was fired for what she claimed was her unwillingness
to manipulate the state's raw COVID data so it would look like DeSantis
urging the state to reopen, was actually safe and reasonable.
We bought this, I bought this.
We reported exactly what she said and
now I have some degree of regret for doing that.
I'll explain why.
DeSantis denies this version of events and
said that she was actually fired for repeated insubordination.
Here's how Democracy Now covered the story at the time.
>> When armed police raided the home of data scientist, Rebekah Jones,
who was forced to resign in May as the lead software developer for
Florida's Coronavirus data portal after she refused to censor
information about Florida's COVID-19 outbreak.
Police seized her computers, pointed guns at her children.
Jones posted video of the raid on Twitter.
>> Police, come down now.
>> Search warrant, calm down [CROSSTALK]
>> What are you doing my children?
>> Rebekah Jones accused Florida's Governor DeSantis of sending the gestapo
after her.
She wrote on Twitter, quote,
this is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly.
This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.
>> Now, I don't want anyone to be too hard or harsh toward Democracy Now.
Because our reporting was very similar to Democracy Now's reporting,
every major publication repeated the same claims.
So, the reality of the situation is actually far more complex.
In a tweet that she had posted and immediately deleted,
Jones admitted that deleting deaths was never something I was asked to do.
I never claimed it was.
But that's a lie.
It absolutely was what she had claimed.
In yet another tweet that has since been deleted,
Jones said that, quote, the woman who told me to delete cases and
deaths is now blaming doctors for the death backlog.
The woman that she was referring to was Florida's Deputy Secretary of Health,
Dr. Shamarial Roberson.
In fact, her claims about Roberson is at the center of her case
against the state of Florida.
She repeated the claim again in February of 2021 tweeting that,
on the day Secretary Roberson asked me to change numbers and
delete records to present a rosier picture of Florida's pandemic than reality,
my Department of Health dashboard hit 100 million views.
I didn't think my new dashboard would ever reach that.
Just hit 150 million.
So what really happened?
Apparently Jones had decided to use the state's emergency alert
system to send out a political message that read, quote,
it's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead.
You know this is wrong, you don't have to be part of this.
Be a hero, speak up before it's too late.
Florida authorities say that the message can be traced to Jones's IP address.
She denies sending it, but I think one can totally understand how much of an issue
it is for anyone to send out a message like that in the middle of a pandemic.
I mean, it's an emergency alert system in Florida, it could lead to mass panic.
And it turns out her home was also raided for that reason.
It was not raided due to the COVID data dispute at all.
Now let's go to May of 2022.
In May of 2022,
Florida's office of Inspector General exonerated the state health officials,
finding her claims against the Department of Health to be unsubstantiated.
In December of 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement, admitting guilt to
unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10th of 2020.
Which ,again, had resulted in her home being searched under
warrant by state police in December of 2020.
Now, after the raid, which Jones deceived everyone into thinking was carried
out over COVID reporting, she started a Go Fund me page for her legal defense.
And she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Finally, right before Jones was fired in May of 2020,
there was an internal complaint by her supervisor because she was publishing
data from the dashboard and talking to the press without permission.
Jones's bad behavior was first formally reported May 6th of 2020,
when the IT director at the Florida Department of Health, Craig Curry,
emailed the department's labor relations consultant, Tiffany Hicks, looking for
guidance on properly documenting actions of one of my employees and
to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.
What's the insubordination, what did she do?
Is it the accurate COVID reporting?
No, actually not.
Among the actions that Curry sought to document were that the employee,
Rebekah Jones, had written posts on websites and
social media regarding data and web product owned by the Department that
she works on without permission of management or communications.
That she had released infographics that should have been identical to
data published by our communication department, but were not, and
most seriously, that she had possibly exposed personnel data in the process.
Now, asked to clarify the problem by Hicks,
Curry confirmed that between April 9th and April 30th of 2020,
he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission, and
more specifically, that he had told her to stop releasing health-department data or
representing her employer without consent.
I mean, look, as a state employee,
you can't just go speak to the press when you are not authorized to do so.
And then you can't get surprised when you're reprimanded for doing so.
But she wasn't even fired for that, she was told, hey, you know what?
This is becoming a problem, you're misrepresenting some stuff here,
you're talking to the press without authorization,
you can no longer work on the COVID dashboard.
Now the next day, she explicitly violated the instruction and
locked out other DOH officials from having any access to it.
She was the only person who had access to the Coronavirus dashboard.
Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created
a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it.
This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department's IT staff.
By 1 :35 p.m on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos's,
that's one of the Department of Health's employees, full administrative access.
Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would,
and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to
spend some time with her family in Mississippi.
Except she didn't.
Turns out that Jones decided to stay working at the Florida Department
of Health, mind you, she hasn't even been fired yet or anything like that, and
started playing nice.
Encouraged by her improved behavior, Curry reported on May 15th of 2020,
that the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward.
But that didn't last long.
At 1:46 p.m, Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard,
many of whom were external to the department,
explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting
that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data.
Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story.
Three days later, Jones was fired.
Now look, she has decided to sue the State of Florida over this,
and maybe through that lawsuit, we will learn more details that
vindicate Rebekah Jones and her version of events.
But considering the documentation of her conduct within the Florida Department
of Health, it's very detailed, we just shared it with you.
There are a lot of details that she was deceptive about toward the public,
a lot of details that she withheld or admitted in her retelling of the story.
She made it seem as though Ron DeSantis ordered her home to be raided over
her refusal to manipulate COVID data, when the fact of the matter was it
had everything to do with her abuse of the state's emergency alert system.
And so, I wanna correct all of those errors that we had previously reported.
And I wanna be clear that out of everyone who works on the main show,
the only person who should be held responsible for that is me.
I'm the executive producer of the show, and I screwed up royally.
And part of the reason why I screwed up is because I had all these biases,
of course, against Ron DeSantis.
I don't really feel bad about that, because I think Ron DeSantis has done
some pretty terrible things in the state of Florida.
But it becomes a problem when that bias blinds you to what the facts
of various stories happen to be.
And I should have done my due diligence, I failed to do so.
And by failing to do so, I feel like I've misled
the audience into thinking that Rebekah Jones is some sort of hero.
Now, to be fair to myself and to be fair to other independent media sources,
if you're not doing your own original reporting,
you're relying on the mainstream media narrative a lot of the time.
And if they're not doing their due diligence, if they're allowing their
personal biases to stand in the way of actual factual reporting, well,
that's unfortunately going to trickle into the way independent news
sources cover these types of stories as well.
Fact of the matter is I want to make sure that I correct my errors,
I get you guys accurate information, and I avoid helping someone who
might be a grifter from fundraising off of our own audience members.
But I wanted to give you guys those corrections, I do apologize for
those mistakes, and I will do better moving forward.