9 hours ago
2
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has condemned a past social media post by Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson that disputed the innocence of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman whom most historians agree was wrongfully convicted of killing a 13-year-old factory worker and lynched in 1915 during a wave of antisemitism in the US.
“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime,” Wilson wrote on X in response to an August 2024 tweet by the ADL marking the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lynching. “The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.”
The original tweet by the ADL said: “Tomorrow marks 109 years since Leo Frank was lynched by a hate-filled mob in Georgia after being falsely accused & unjustly convicted of murder in a trial marred by antisemitism. ADL fought to clear Frank’s name & he was finally pardoned in 1986. May his memory be a blessing.”
Wilson’s post, which was sent from her personal account @KingsleyCortes on 16 August and had not been deleted at the time of publication, was recently surfaced on Bluesky by Tristan Lee, a data scientist at the investigative journalism collective, Bellingcat.
Wilson was recently appointed as deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense.
“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank,” an ADL spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
The Pentagon referred a request for comment to Wilson for “any remarks made in her personal capacity”.
Wilson did not immediately respond.
Neo-Nazis have long maintained Frank’s guilt, disputing the historical consensus that he was framed and convicted in a trial tainted by antisemitism.
In 1913, Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old child laborer, was found strangled at an Atlanta pencil factory. Frank, the factory’s manager, was arrested and later convicted of Phagan’s rape and murder. He was sentenced to death in a trial that unfolded during a period of rampant antisemitism, in which tabloids and cartoons inflamed public sentiment by spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish economic influence.
After the state’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison over a lack of evidence proving his guilt, in 1915, an armed mob, which included influential community leaders, abducted Frank from his prison cell and lynched him.
Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986, after a campaign led by the ADL, whose founding – with the mission to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” – was inspired by the case.
But Frank’s conviction also led to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and extremism experts say the case continues to animate white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups today.
In 2013, an investigation by the Forward found ties between the proliferation of websites pushing a revisionist history of the Frank case and known neo-Nazis. It reported that one site, Leofrank.info, which bills itself inconspicuously as the Leo Frank Case Research Library, was registered to Kevin Strom, an avowed white supremacist described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a leader in the American neo-Nazi movement.
Wilson previously worked for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank started by Russ Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who was an architect of Project 2025 and now leads the office of budget and management. She also served as a national committeewoman with the DC Young Republicans and was an aide on the Trump 2020 campaign.
Wilson has a long record of controversial tweets. Last year, she tweeted, “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory … it’s reality,” appending a screengrab of a Bloomberg headline about the growth of the US Hispanic population. The racist theory posits that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans through mass migration.
In other posts, she disparaged immigrants and trans people. And in 2023, she drew criticism over a tweet that declared: “Let’s make Kosovo Serbia again.”
