influencers
By Olivia Craighead, a news writer for the Cut who covers pop culture and celebrity. Previously, she wrote about pop culture and entertainment at Gawker.
Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
Another day, another influencer’s shockingly racist tweets coming to light. This time, the tweets belong to Brooke Schofield, who just last month became a hero to the women of TikTok after she exposed all of her ex-boyfriend’s lies in a 14-part series. Now, she’s in hot water for what she shared on Twitter as a teenager. Here’s what you need to know:
Who is Brooke Schofield?
Brooke Schofield is an L.A. influencer whose star has been on the rise recently. Since 2021, she’s co-hosted the podcast Cancelled alongside perennial YouTube main character Tana Mongeau. Upon returning from a hiatus last year, the podcast became a more equitable affair — when it launched, it was definitively Mongeau’s with Schofield as sidekick— which led to Schofield seeing a rise in popularity.
If you are on TikTok, you almost certainly know who Schofield is. Last month, she racked up tens of millions of views for telling the wild story of her relationship with musician Clinton Kane (if you haven’t heard of him, don’t worry about it). Her story, which included allegations of Kane faking an Australian accent and claiming his whole family had died when they hadn’t, set the app on fire. (He, of course, denied most of her allegations in a 29-part TikTok series of his own.) The episode of Cancelled in which they discuss Kane is their second-most-watched video on YouTube.
Suffice it to say Schofield was riding high. She was doing brand deals with T-Mobile, she and Mongeau recently announced another tour, and everyone seemed to love her. Then someone posted her old tweets.
What did she tweet?
From 2012 to 2016, Schofield posted several tweets that were racist and hom*ophobic. She used slurs for gay people, supported Donald Trump, and, most disturbingly, came to the defense of George Zimmerman, the man who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.
An anonymous TikTok user who goes by @clipopatra posted several screenshots of Schofield’s old tweets back in July, but the slideshow only started to gain traction this past weekend. At that point, the story was shared up by PopCrave, where it really took off.
Schofield, then 16, wrote, “Guarantee if Zimmerman shot a white guy this wouldn’t even be a story. NEWS FLASH THIS WASN’T A CRIME OF RACISM IT WAS SELF DEFENSE.”
Shortly after @clipopatra’s initial post started to go viral, they shared another round of Schofield’s old tweets. These ones were from 2016, a couple weeks before her 20th birthday, and featured the podcaster’s support of then–presidential candidate Donald Trump. “AMERICA IS GREAT AGAIN,” Schofield tweeted the day after the election.
@clipopatra Replying to @v1ciosa just gonna leave these here #brookeschofield #cancelled
♬ Dumb Americans - George Carlin
A few days after the scandal broke, Schofield finally released an apology.
Was her apology any good?
It’s hard to make a “good” apology for something like this, but she certainly tried — twice. “First of all, I want to acknowledge that I feel the same way about them that you do. I think they’re so disturbing, they’re wrong, they’re horrible, and they’re disgusting,” Schofield said about her tweets in a three-minute video.
When it came to the Trayvon Martin tweets, Schofield quickly owned up to how wrong they were but also wanted to contextualize her upbringing and how she came to those beliefs.
“My parents were addicts, so I was adopted by my grandparents, and I was like 10, and I grew up with them from that point on. And as is true for a lot of grandparents, they’re a little bit less progressive than a lot of us are,” she explained. Her grandfather “is a very, very right-wing conservative man. It was like my household was literally just Fox News all the time. Rush Limbaugh, like, if you guys know who that is, he played literally all day long, through the house, and that was just like the only thing ever that I had been exposed to.”
“There are people in my life who I might have looked up to forever, who I do not agree with,” Schofield added. “And it’s amazing now that people are, like, learning earlier on about politics and, like, forming their own opinions outside of, like, what their parents think or what they’re hearing or whatever it is. But that just wasn’t the case for me. Whatever I heard, I passed on. I’m sorry, very, very sorry to anybody who is hurt by the tweets because obviously they’re very hurtful.”
“I am 27 years old now,” Schofield said tearfully. “I’ve had so much time to learn and grow and, like, formulate my own opinions, and they are nothing like they were when I was 17-18 years old.”
What’s the fallout from all of this?
Obviously, people are very upset with her. “The ‘she was young’ defense is such bullsh*t as if young POC dont have to grow up around demonic racists like this. F her,” wrote one user on the r/LAInfluencerSnark subreddit. “She was as old as Trayvon when he was murdered and she sure was quick to claim that he was an adult,” wrote another.
Boys Lie, a clothing brand that recently released a collaboration with Schofield, made a statement condemning the situation in the vaguest possible terms. “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,” the brand wrote on its Instagram Stories. The link to Schofield’s collaboration with the brand no longer works.
Has Schofield responded?
Presumably seeing this reaction, Schofield posted a second apology video last week admitting she had “missed the mark.” “I don’t care if I was a teenager, I was old enough to know better,” she said, this time in a six-minute clip. “Nobody forced me to tweet those things. The blame is on me.” After elaborating on how studying public health in college and then educating herself on anti-racism after the murder of George Floyd “shifted my mindset completely,” she said she’s “truly ashamed it took me that long” and added that she wants to work harder on reparation initiatives and giving Black creators more visibility. “I understand there are people who are never gonna forgive me,” she said.
What does Mongeau have to say about all this?
Schofield’s podcast co-host — who, as her podcast’s name suggests, has tweeted and apologized for some racial slurs of her own — did not publicly address the controversy for a week. Then the duo’s newest Cancelled episode aired Monday with an eight-minute solo video in which Mongeau called Schofield’s posts “f*cked-up” and “horrific.” “I’ve made it very clear to Brooke that I condemn her for these tweets,” Mongeau said. She also apologized for commenting “We grew up bad, I love you” on Schofield’s first apology video, clarifying, “I have no right to forgive her as a white person for the things that she said. I still have things to learn and unlearn.”
Mongeau added that, during their four years working on the pod together, Schofield “never once saw her exhibit any behaviors, words, or anything that aligns with those tweets” but said she hopes her co-host is “taking the time to reflect and grow in a lot of the ways that I did.” She also shared that she’s donating the proceeds of this episode and the contents of her TikTok creator fund to the Trayvon Martin Foundation.
This post has been updated.
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