Amanda Seales And Shaun King Spar Over Rodney Reed Activism
Social media has been lit up by users since Rodney Reed’s execution was stayed by the Texas Court of Appeals, many of whom are battling over whether his case deserves a fresh look.
Perhaps the best example of the discourse over Reed’s case revealed itself recently via Insecure actress Amanda Seals and activist Shaun King. Seals took to her Instagram account on Sunday (November 17) and posted a nine-minute long selfie video she titled “What I want I realized prior to rallying for Rodney Reed.”
During the video, Seals relayed her concern over the unrelated rape allegations that have been levied against Reed in the past and called advocates for the death row inmate as “duplictous.” She also revealed she regrets once backing Reed’s exoneration.
“It’s very duplicitous, not just his family, but persons who fancy themselves activists, were doing so with the knowledge that his person, Rodney Reed, is not just accused of but has been linked to previous rapes via his DNA being discovered within the victim,” she said in the IG video.
After watching the video, Shaun King responded on his Instagram, captioning a repost of the video with the “factual errors” in Seales’ reasoning over the Reed case.
“On behalf of the family of Rodney Reed, I have to respond here directly to @AmandaSeales. We’ve counted over 20 egregious factual errors in her viral video, but NONE were more inflammatory and damaging than this one,” he wrote. “Here, she says that Rodney Reed, who she fails to say was a high school student at the time, in Wichita Falls, Texas, raped and killed a woman there. LIES. ALL LIES. I am proud to report that only Amanda, in her rush to get a video out, killed that woman. She is thankfully still alive and well today. She was not murdered by Rodney or anyone else. And a jury voted quickly and unanimously to acquit Rodney on all charges in that case.
“Sooooooo many lies in this video,” he continued. “Rodney did not commit the crime, was acquitted, and the woman was never murdered. People. Be careful what you listen to out here. Amanda called herself Google searching the case for a few hours and said a lot of factually incorrect stuff that does real harm.”
King also posted tweets about the Rodney Reed case on his Twitter, claiming that the Innocence Project, who has been pushing for his exoneration, would not be “duped” by Reed over the past 18 years.
On Monday, Seales took to her Instagram Live and chatted with one of her followers on the platform about the Reed case. While not speaking about King explicitly, she reiterated her position about her support for Reed.
“The point that I was making was that I felt that there was a lot of other pertinent information attached to this individual’s existence, in relation to this case, that was not presented,” she said. “I’m not the only one but I think there’s other people who have looked at the information provided by the Innocence Project, the information provided by other sources and still don’t feel confident he could be innocent. So that’s where I think opinion comes in.”
On Friday (November 15), Rodney Reed was granted a stay of execution after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously recommended Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delay Reed’s execution.
Reed and his family have long proclaimed his innocence in the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Investigators reportedly suspected Stites’ then-fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell as the culprit. Stites was strangled with her own belt and her dead body was left in a wooded area. Reed was convicted more than 20 years ago, by an all-white Texas jury, after his DNA was found inside Stites.
In the 1998 case, Reed claimed he had been having a consensual sexual relationship with Stites, which was why his DNA was in her vaginal cavity. Forensic scientists have also said it’s scientifically impossible that Reed was the murderer, according to the DNA. In addition, the murder weapon was never tested for DNA.
