A conservative influencer defended her viral reaction to the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where she posted a kissy-faced selfie and echoed other media outlets’ reporting that the gunman was dead.
Debra Lea, a 25-year-old MAGA TikToker featured in the White House’s “new media” influencers pool, came under fire after she fled from the mayhem at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.
When she was safely a few blocks away, Lea — a frequent contributor to Fox News — took to X and shared a selfie she’d taken earlier that day, accompanied by the caption: “Shooter at WH correspondence dinner. Shooter is dead. Thank you secret service.”
The alleged gunman, Cole Allen, 31, was quickly captured by authorities before he could unleash his twisted plot to assassinate Trump administration officials. One Secret Service agent was shot in the whirlwind takedown and has since been released from the hospital.
And the backlash against Lea was swift.
She deleted the post, which she based off circulating reports from CNN and Fox News, before she even realized it was inaccurate. By then, though, a large sum of her following — 318,000 followers across Instagram and X — had already reshared or screenshotted the viral post.
But Lea refused to cave to strangers’ demands for an apology over her innocent misreport.
“I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t hurt anybody,” Lea told the Wall Street Journal.
CNN and Fox News both initially reported that the gunman was dead. Lea and several other political influencers piggybacked those outlets’ reports.
Both cable news outlets later clarified in their live broadcasts that the situation was still developing and corrected their reports as fresh information came to light — caveats that were not included in influencers’ posts.
Lea said she was baffled by the loads of criticism lobbed at her.
“People are always trying to delegitimize my own opinions and my platform,” she told the outlet.
“And then when something happens, I’m suddenly held to the highest level of journalistic integrity.”
Still, Lea assured that she “would act a little bit differently” going forward.
Before she shared the since-deleted post, Lea also claimed in another video that there were “no metal detectors” at the high-level dinner.
The video was quickly slapped with a community note clarifying that there were, in fact, magnetometers at the event — which Allen was seen sprinting past when he charged towards the ballroom.
