The wife and mother of Greg and Travis McMichael has launched a website countering “media-driven narratives” about her convicted family members and presenting her account of what happened the day Ahmaud Arbery was killed.
The McMichaels are serving life sentences in state prisons for Arbery’s murder on Feb. 23, 2020. Cellphone video shows the father-son duo chasing Arbery down in a truck as he was running through their south Georgia neighborhood before shooting and killing him. His death was the launchpad for massive protests across the country, just three months before George Floyd was slain.
In an attempt to present a lesser-known version of events, Leigh McMichael started a website to raze the narratives that painted her husband and son as white vigilantes who murdered a Black jogger out of racial motivation. She reiterated what defense attorneys argued in court — that the McMichaels believed Arbery was criminally canvassing their neighborhood and endeavored to make a citizen’s arrest that went wrong.
The website compiles some short biographies about the McMichaels, a run-through of their murder trials, a chronicle of events on the day Arbery was killed from Leigh McMichael’s perspective, as well as an entire web page that summarizes Arbery’s previous run-ins with police and soils his character.
“My personal experience since this story went viral tells me that it would be futile to spend time and energy trying to persuade those with a closed mindset that the public narrative driven by the mainstream media is at a minimum incomplete and at most a downright fabrication,” McMichael wrote on the site. “I’ll also provide any open-minded visitor to this site with information and evidence about Ahmaud’s tumultuous past which culminated in his death on February 23, 2020.”
Several social media users reacted cynically to the website’s launch and the version of events McMichael posted.
“We heard their side. In court. Where they were convicted. They are exactly where they deserve to be,” one Reddit user wrote.
“‘My husband and son are not racist’ is really just a sign that we have monumentally failed to convey a better understanding of what racism is and how it functions,” another commenter posted. “It matters not how little or how much racial prejudice the McMichaels may have carried around on a daily basis. That’s not what racism is. It’s a description of the whole society that made a black man going for a run a vulnerable position and created the position of these two white guys who thought they needed to go attack Ahmaud Arbery.”
“I can’t seem to find any sympathy for her or her family. I have used it all up for the man’s family that was murdered,” one person said. “Good, cry harder lady. I used to see Ahmaud running all the time. This happened about two minutes from my house. They are despicable cowards and deserve what they got,” another Reddit user wrote.
Since Arbery’s death, McMichael said her family, close friends, and neighbors have been “harassed, intimidated and at times threatened by people who seek to suppress the truth about the documented events that led up to Ahmaud’s death.”
She asks those sympathetic to her and her family’s situation to donate to a fundraiser to help pay the McMichaels’ sizable legal expenses. McMichael says the family owes upwards of $60,000 in legal fees that could exceed $250,000 if they continue working to appeal the case. So far, she’s raised more than $40,000.
The McMichaels are currently in the process of appealing their federal hate crime convictions. Even if a court decided to overturn their hate crimes conviction, they would remain in prison.
