Will Faux-Whistleblower Rebekah Jones’ Boosters Apologize After She Admitted She Lied?

Screenshot via Rebekah Jones on Facebook

Rebekah Jones, the faux-whistleblower who alleged without evidence that the state of Florida was purposefully understating the number of residents dying from Covid-19 at the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the state last week.

The deal is simple: Jones admits to illegally accessing and downloading state data, as well as sending a message to 1,750 employees using state systems, pays $20,000 to the state, and agrees to attend therapy in exchange for the state holding off on prosecution for 24 months.

As National Review‘s Charlie Cooke proved in his comprehensive debunking of Jones’s claims last year, Jones was fired from her position with the Florida Department of Health not for trying to tell the truth, but for serial insubordination, intentionally crashing the state’s Covid count dashboard, and, after having been forgiven for all of it, sending a mass email falsely claiming that she was being punished for trying to update the dashboard with accurate numbers.

Jones was never able to marshal any evidence to support the claim that she had been instructed to falsify data, and the frightening story she later told about police training their weapons on her and her children during the execution of a search warrant at her home was proven to be a lie by body-cam footage.

In spite of Jones’s admission of guilt, her longtime boosters in the media, after amplifying her false version of events, have buried the real story of Rebekah Jones, allowing her to make a small fortune off of her baseless claims and even secure the Democratic nomination to represent Florida’s 1st congressional district in 2022.

Ron Filipkowski, a professional tweeter with nearly 600,000 followers, resigned from his position on the 12th Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission in Florida in 2020 to pursue his current vocation because he purported to believe Jones. Filipkowski’s pinned tweet is a picture of his resignation letter, a document that calls Jones a “hero” and her treatment “unconscionable.” He has never acknowledged the collapse of her tall tale.

CNN’s John Avlon called the execution of the search warrant “completely unacceptable” and falsely echoed Jones’s claim that DeSantis had personally authorized the operation. Avlon deleted his tweet, but has never publicly apologized for promoting Jones and amplifying her lies.

The Washington Post’s Marisa Iati actually linked to one of Jones’s GoFundMe accounts (Jones had raised over $500,000 by December 2020 and continues to solicit donations to this day) in a story that credulously described Jones’s unsubstantiated claims as “serious” and offered no further scrutiny of them. She put a bow on the article with the GoFundMe link and a quote from Jones claiming that all she wanted to do was “help people.” No correction was ever affixed to the story.

Alexander Nazaryon, the author of a sprawling longform hagiography of Jones at Yahoo headlined “A public health employee predicted Florida’s coronavirus catastrophe — then she was fired: ‘This is everything I was trying to warn people about’” also promoted Jones’s self-fundraising efforts. Nazaryon has not only failed to correct the record, but has not tweeted about Jones since December 2020,

And MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave Jones the “Last Word” on his program, providing her with an enormous platform to uncritically repeat her demonstrably false version of events. “Rebekah Jones, thank you very much for joining us. Very, very sorry that you and your family were put through what we all witnessed on that video yesterday morning,” genuflected O’Donnell at the end of her appearance.

Jones has legally admitted to being a criminal after two and a half years of failing to substantiate the underlying reason for why she says she committed her crimes. It’s time that each and every one of her boosters do the bare minimum, grab the loudest microphone available to them, apologize for their motivated gullibility, and urge those who still count them as credible to stop signing checks.

They all praised Jones for being “brave” enough to tell the “truth.” If they truly care about the truth, they should be brave enough now to share the truth about Jones with their audiences.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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