Brooke Schofield Racist Tweets Scandal, Explained

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:

Brooke Schofield is an LA 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 had n’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 of hers.

From 2012 to 2016, Schofield posted several tweets that were racist and homophobic. 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.

A few days after the scandal broke, Schofield finally released an apology.

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 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 anyone 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.”

Obviously, people are very upset with her. “The ‘she was young’ defense is such bullshit as if young POC don’t 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 his Instagram Stories. The link to Schofield’s collaboration with the brand no longer works.

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 going to forgive me,” she said.

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 “fucked-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 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.