COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones sues Florida officials over gunpoint raid at her home
A Florida geographer who claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate the state’s COVID-19 statistics filed a lawsuit against several top officials Monday over a “sham” raid at her Tallahassee home.
The complaint accuses the Florida Department of Law Enforcement of violating her constitutional rights by sending armed officers to her house and seizing her belongings in what she decried as a dangerous attempt to intimidate scientists.
“The basis of the warrant was a sham to punish plaintiff for her protected speech,” her lawyers wrote in the lawsuit obtained by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
One of the defendants named in the suit is FDLE commissioner Rick Swearingen, who has defended the officers’ actions on Dec. 7. His agency was serving a search warrant that day in connection with a probe into who hacked Florida’s internal notification system and sent a message urging government employees to “speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” a reference to the state’s coronavirus death toll.
Videos of the controversial raid shows heavily armed officers storming Jones’ home as the visibly upset woman tells them not to point their guns at her children.
“Why is he pointing a gun up the stairs? There are children up there!” she said.
Jones, who was fired from the Florida Department of Health in early May, has denied hacking the state’s notification service and accused the state of using Gestapo tactics against her.
“This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power,” she wrote on Twitter after the raid. “I tell them my husband and my two children are upstairs... and THEN one of them draws his gun. On my children.”
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It’s unclear from the 30-second video she shared on social media or the body-cam footage authorities posted online whether the weapons were ever pointed at the kids.
Swearingen has previously pushed back against her allegations and denounced the Nazi police comparison.
“The Gestapo dragged innocent men, women, and children out of their homes and murdered them,” he told reporters last week. “To compare agents lawfully executing a search warrant to the Gestapo is just ridiculous.”
RELATED: Gunpoint raid on Florida scientist's home ignited backlash
Jones has been a vocal critic of Gov. Ron De Santis’ handling of the pandemic and his efforts to open up the economy despite soaring infections and deaths across the states. She was one of the leading scientists working on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard before she was fired for “insubordination.”
DeSantis defended her termination, saying she went against her superiors.
Jones has since published research on the pandemic and set up her own coronavirus dashboard with daily updates on the state’s infections and fatalities.
