White teen awarded millions after black mom labeled him a ‘racist bully’ in online hoax…
A shocking claim, a “racist” angle, followed by a flood of headlines, a GoFundMe that fills up overnight, and before anyone has time to sort out what actually happened, the accused is already branded for life.
The facts usually catch up later, and we discover the whole thing was a hoax. But the damage to the victim is already done.
That’s exactly why this Texas case is getting so much attention. Another white teen was attacked and wrongly labeled as a “racist bully,” and a black mother gained a lot of money and social clout for being a “victim.”
Underneath all the viral noise and horrific racist allegations was a middle school incident that might have been immature and disgusting, but it was in no way racist. And a jury agreed with him in a big way.
Here’s what went down:
A group of eighth-graders pulled a cruel sleepover stunt that never should have happened.
But the jury flat-out rejected the claim that the behavior was driven by racial hatred and awarded him a heck of a lot of cash.
A Texas teenager has been awarded a staggering $3.2 million jury verdict after a classmate’s mom fueled viral social media claims that he was a racist bully when he was just “doing immature, dumb things.”
Asher Vann, now 19, was accused of racially motivated bullying after he and several other eighth-graders were filmed duping their middle school classmate SeMarion Humphrey, who is black, into drinking his own urine during a birthday sleepover in Plano in 2021.
The classmate’s mom, Summer Smith, quickly went public with the race-based claims, alleging at the time that Vann and his cohort had also hurled slurs at and shot her then-13-year-old son with a BB gun in the racially motivated attack.
But a jury last week ruled that Smith’s accusations, as well as the subsequent viral narrative that exploded after the teen was outed on social media, had invaded Vann’s privacy and forced him to endure severe emotional distress.
“This wasn’t me doing a racist act. This isn’t me hating someone because of their skin color. This was me at an immature stage of my life at a sleepover for my birthday, doing immature, dumb things,” Vann, who is now a college freshman, told WFAA in the wake of the jury’s ruling.
“It was immature. It was stupid. It was nasty. But that’s not who I am, and that’s not me today.”
Two things that can be true at the same time, without it having to be some “racist” explosion.
What happened at that sleepover was immature and stupid. Even the teen involved has made that clear. But turning bad teenage behavior into a national racial scandal is a very different step, and in this case, a jury decided that line was crossed, and the “race” part was a hoax, created and perpetuated by this very opportunistic mother.
Attorney Justin Nichols told Fox News the jury consisted of five African American members, three Asian members, two Latino members and the remaining jurors were Caucasian — a diverse panel he said carefully weighed the evidence before reaching its decision.
He also responded to Smith’s statement while appearing on-air.
“This is emblematic of somebody who continues to refuse to accept responsibility throughout the case, throughout their depositions and even on the stand,” he said.
“They continued to push this false narrative of racism that they know did not exist, that was untrue, and they continue to double down instead of finally taking some responsibility for hurting so many lives.”
This was young boys being “boys” and had absolutely nothing to do with race.
But boys being boys doesn’t pay the bills or raise over a hundred thousand dollars. Most of which, the mom spent on herself, by the way.
After a clip from the sleepover went viral, Smith, and her attorney Kim Cole, raised nearly $120,000 on GoFundMe to help pay for his ‘therapy and private schooling.’
Humphrey’s mom targeted Asher Vann – a white student who was hosting the sleepover – and ran his name through the mud in a bid to get ‘justice’ for her son.
[…]
According to records obtained by the Free Beacon, Smith put a mere $1,000 of the staggering GoFundMe pot toward her son’s assets – pocketing the rest for herself.
The account statements reveal the remaining funds were spent on luxuries, including a designer dog, dining and travel, cell phones and car payments.
This racial hoax happened back in 2021.
Remember when Summer Smith alleged in 2021 that her son was “tortured” by white middle schoolers who shot him with a BB gun and made him drink urine?
Well, a Judge just ruled that the entire thing was a HOAX.
The media and leftist organizations slandered young boys for this FAKE “racially-motivated hate crime.”
Summers must now pay one of the boys $3.2 MILLION in damages for LYING about him.
This poor white teen has been branded a racist monster for about 5 years now, and his life has been turned upside down.
‘I was getting death threats from thousands of people on social media,’ Vann told Free Beacon, who is now a freshman in college.
‘People leaked my address and my name. During one of the protests, they walked all the way to my house and threw bricks through my house.’
Vann and his family sued Smith and Cole for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress, which the jury ruled in Vann’s favor.
‘It was scary. These were adults, and I was in middle school at the time. Full-grown adults were rushing my house and causing harm to it,’ Vann told the outlet.
‘What if I was home and they saw me? They could have ripped me from my home and beaten me. It was very scary.’
Cases like this hit with so much force because they raise an uncomfortable question: how many viral moral panics are being fully vetted before innocent people’s reputations are destroyed?
Nothing is vetted. The media runs with these hoax stories the second they hear the words “white,” “black,” and “racism.”
But let’s be real, when accusations like this carry instant financial and social rewards, the temptation to paint anything and everything as “racist,” probably feels like your ship has finally come in.
Thankfully, a jury in Texas weighed in on this one and made things right.
But the bigger lesson is one our media needs to learn. In the age of viral activism and online fundraising, the rush to label, shame, and monetize a controversy shouldn’t move faster than the truth.
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