An obscure Facebook page purporting to be that of Augusta County School Board candidate Page Hearn, and obviously is not, from even a cursory look at the content, has the attention of, if few others, certainly Hearn.
“Unfortunately, it’s not a crime, but if I can prove who it is, it is the definition of slander and defamation,” Hearn wrote on her own Facebook page on Wednesday, on a post in which she alleges that the person behind the page, which is titled Page Hearn for Augusta County School Board – Riverheads District, is Jennifer Lewis, a local political activist.
I reached out to Hearn to ask her how she had come to that conclusion, but she didn’t respond to either of my two efforts to get in contact.
Lewis did get back to me when I reached out to her to ask if she is the author of the page.
“I have no idea who is behind that page,” Lewis replied in an email. “I told Page herself, I don’t hide behind fake profiles. I’ve been very honest on how I feel about her on my personal Facebook page. I don’t need a fake profile. I have no idea who is running it.”
With that settled, somebody out there with an axe to grind is using the page, which has limited reach on Facebook – the page has just 28 followers – to go after Hearn, who, to be fair, has items out there on her record that are low hanging fruit for critics to use against her.
The highlight there being, Hearn was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which we know because she posted about being there on her Facebook page.
“I was there, literally front and center today on the steps of the Capitol building and a peaceful protest of Patriots wanting an investigation into election fraud was infiltrated by anti-American terrorists,” she wrote, per reporting from The News Leader.
How “front and center” was Hearn to that day’s events?
“I saw a guy try to break a window and the crowd swarmed him so fast and took him out the police didn’t even have to,” she wrote in the Facebook post. “Another guy grabbed an officer and tried to pull him into the crowd, but the crowd grabbed him and got the officer back to the line then escorted him away.”
So, when the author of the Page Hearn for Augusta County School Board – Riverheads District page posts about Hearn being a “Jan. 6th insurrectionist,” Hearn hasn’t been charged with a crime for having been on the scene that day, but she was there.
I mentioned to Hearn in emails to her asking for comment for this story that I wanted to ask her about Jan. 6.
Again, she did not get back to me to offer comment on the story.
The fake Facebook page also links to a new story from a Charlotte TV station with a provocative headline: “Woman Accused Of Poverty Shaming Mom Who Changed Her Mind About Adoption,” which details the efforts of Hearn and her husband, Warren Cash, to adopt a baby, plans that fell through when the baby’s birth mother decided to keep her daughter.
The story examines comments that Hearn made on Facebook after the planned adoption fell through that the station mentioned “ticked some people off.”
“Instead of coming home to her room, she went home to an empty RV with only the outfit she was wearing. No crib, no clothes, no books, no bassinet, no nothing, her ‘home’ is as empty as our hearts,” Hearn wrote.
The question that the station tried to answer in its news report: “Are those her true feelings about people with less than she has, or do you blame it on the grief?”
The rest of the content on the fake Facebook page is par for the course for what a progressive would say about a MAGA Republican – with images of people in Klan robes, the Aug. 11 alt-right march in Charlottesville, more about Jan. 6.
Again, low hanging fruit, and almost certainly not the kind of stuff that fits the “definition of slander and defamation,” as Hearn is trying to claim – any more than Hearn’s posts asserting without evidence that Lewis is behind the page would itself constitute slander and defamation, especially if, as Lewis asserts, Lewis personally informed Hearn that she is not behind the page.
As for me even writing about a fake Facebook page with all of 28 followers being used to attack a School Board candidate, the page only came to my attention because a Hearn supporter, Kristina DeLange, reached out to me by email to suggest that AFP look into the page, repeating the allegation from Hearn that Lewis is the one behind it.
When I wrote back to DeLange to tell her that I would look into the page, but that Hearn probably wouldn’t like what I would write, given what I know about Hearn’s record of being a political extremist – it seems fair to me to refer to someone who was on scene at Jan. 6 and praised the “patriots” who overran the Capitol as an “extremist” – I got back an answer that I didn’t expect.
“I don’t believe the so-called insurrection happen(e)d like the media displayed it,” DeLange wrote me back. “No. They were let in, and it was all staged. I didn’t think anyone believed the lies that it was random.”
My reply:
“I didn’t know there were actual people like you who actually believe that Jan. 6 was staged. I thought those people were a media creation.”
This, apparently, is what the person behind the fake Facebook page is trying to keep away from the Augusta County School Board.
I have to say, I applaud the effort, even if it isn’t getting much traction.
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Chris Graham
