Many of you may remember, in the earliest months of the pandemic, a weird little dust-up in Florida wherein state epidemiological worker Rebekah Jones claimed to have been fired by the DeSantis administration because she refused to manipulate state COVID data to make DeSantis look good.
This may be totally and completely surprising, but it turns out that those claims were... completely untrue:
A state investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing in connection with the explosive allegations brought by Florida's former coronavirus data expert, who had accused top state health officials two years ago of firing her for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data to support the push to reopen Florida after months of quarantine.
Specific allegations raised by former agency data manager Rebekah Jones — who gained national media attention with her sensational accusations against the DeSantis administration — were either "unsubstantiated," meaning there was insufficient evidence to prove or disprove, or "unfounded," concluding the alleged conduct didn't occur, according to the findings.
Absolute shocker here folks!
Over at National Review last year, Charlie Cooke penned a blistering takedown of Jones's claims, one in which he outlined her disturbing history of disturbing behavior:
One is almost left impressed by the strange alchemy with which Jones manages to transmute her own bad behavior into lucrative victimhood. A 342-page "manifesto" that Jones penned in 2019 gives example after example of this tendency. She manages to cast herself as the injured party in the passages in which she describes violating a no-contact order to engage with an ex-boyfriend, damaging his car, and harassing his mother. She also manages to cast herself as the victim in the parts in which she records being fired from Florida State University for having sex with a student in her office and for lying to her employer about her criminal record. She even presents herself in defensive terms in a now-removed part of the document that contains explicit text messages between her and her ex-boyfriend, as well as close-up photographs of the man's genitals. (A misdemeanor stalking case against Jones, filed by Florida in 2019, is ongoing, although the cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking charges have been dropped or narrowed, as were earlier charges, relating to the same individual, of trespass, felony robbery, and contempt of court.) Everywhere Jones goes—whether it's Louisiana State University (where she got her master's), Florida State, or the Florida Department of Health—she seems always to leave a trail of wreckage. And somehow, it's always someone else's fault.
Indeed—and even in spite of this latest humiliating defeat, she's not giving up:
She plans to sue the state in federal court for wrongful dismissal now that the state investigation is complete.
"It's something that's been a life-defining experience," Jones said of her confrontation with the DeSantis administration over the COVID-19 data.
I bet! I'm sure the federal court will be happy to define it a little further for her!
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