A Black Lives Matter activist from Utah is speaking out about the death threats she received after making an appearance on “PBS American Portrait” on Tuesday, Jan. 26.
Lex Scott, the founder of Black Lives Matter Utah, shared two dozen audio recordings of the threats she received on Facebook Wednesday night, and spoke to KSL.com about some of the threatening messages she had gotten, including a voice message from a man who called several times and claimed the “American Resistance” would “f–k” her up.
“I need them to know that they didn’t destroy me, and that I’m not going to cower,” Scott told KSL.com, describing the messages as a kind of “psychological warfare.”
“They have to know that, hey, if you leave a message like this, I’m going to be on Facebook laughing at you. I’m laughing at you! You didn’t destroy me.”
In one of the voice messages Scott received, a man tells her, “We will f–k you up. We will take everything you own.” The man went own to ask how many times he would have to tell her to “stand down.”
“You don’t even have a place to hide, b-tch,” the man said. “This isn’t a threat, c-nt,” this is a promise,” the man said in a second recording.
In another recording, a different man called Scott a “f–king n—er,” and asked, “Are you dead yet?”
“Black lives splatter!” another man said in one recording.
“We’re coming for you Lex. Bang bang motherf—-r,” one woman said in another audio clip.
Scott’s voicemail specifically states that death threats will be reported to the FBI. Upon hearing her voicemail, the FBI said, that’s “great” because callers “knew what they were doing when they left the death threat.”
One of the callers mocked the FBI in a voicemail, saying, “Please, charge me with a crime.”
PBS describes its ongoing “American Portrait” series as a national project that asks individuals across the country to submit stories in response to a number of though-provoking prompts.
The docuseries features footage filmed by everyday people and explores what it means to be an American today.
Scott appeared in the series in an episode entitled “I Rise.” She spoke about the challenges she faced as a Black child growing up in Utah, and explained how she first became involved with activism.
“Our organization is truly a multi-pronged approach,” she explained. “We hit the streets to protest police who brutalize and murder people; we work with legislators on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation that would stop police brutality from occurring; and we also work with police to hold them accountable for their actions and to correct the wrongs they’ve already committed.”
She filmed the footage for the episode over a period of three months.
Scott said she forwarded all of the death threats to the FBI and that the agency has reached out to she and other activists in the past to encourage them to report hate crimes and death threats.
“Some [threats] they can prosecute, some of them they can’t,” Scott said Thursday, adding that some threats are more explicit than others. “But I still try, because you never know if someone might try to follow through on their death threat.”
