Rebecca Scofield

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1:02It is so hard to feel like you are being unmade in front of a public spotlight. And to have something this salacious, this disgusting and horrific be what my parents and one day my kids will read about me. It is humiliating beyond words. There are moments that divide a life into before and after. For Rebecca Schofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho, that moment came on Thanksgiving Day 2022 when she watched a TikTok post. This is the teacher who potentially had the four Idaho students killed. Eleven days earlier, four students, Kaylee Gonsalves, Madison Mogan, Ethan Chapin, and Zanna Kernodal, had been savagely stabbed to death in a house off campus.

2:02It was a crime that horrified the nation. The TikTok post accused Rebecca of masterminding the murders. Then came another TikTok. She's going to realize that it's very hard to outrun consequences of her actions. And another. She makes this quick, impulsive decision to have them killed. A barrage of posts calling Rebecca a killer until she decided to fight back. But this isn't just a story about one woman's mission to clear her name. It's a story about all of us and how vulnerable we are on social media. Here's my conversation with Rebecca Schofield about her before and after.

2:49Well, Rebecca, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me. You know, as we sit down and thinking, did you ever in a million years imagine you'd be sitting here with me talking about something like this? Absolutely not. Have you talked about this before? Not really, no. I just wanted to make sure that I had time to process everything before really starting to speak publicly about it. Are you processing? I think I will be for the rest of my life. Your life has changed that profoundly. I think my entire way that I think about the world, the way I parent, the decisions I make about pretty much everything has shifted radically since that day three and a half years ago.

3:40And you clearly didn't see any of this coming. Absolutely not. I think the idea that you will be randomly accused of murder is not something people consider. There's no playbook for this. It sounds like life was going pretty well for you. You just became head of the history department. I think you were writing a book. I really see my life kind of before this point as this, you know, fairly steady upward trajectory. I had studied very hard and left my rural Idaho town to go to college. I went from undergrad to an elite graduate school. I was married to a person I've been friends with since I was 14.

4:27We had beautiful children. Everything seemed really normal. How did you first find out about the murders? So my spouse and I had spent that weekend in Oregon at the wedding of one of our friends, and I received what's called a vandal alert, which is the University of Idaho's mass messaging system saying there has been a crime, more information to come. They sent out another communication that evening that provided a little bit more information, but still no sense of who the victims were or how the students had died. And then I found out details along with the rest of the public over the next couple days.

5:18Four University of Idaho students killed, their bodies found by Moscow police Sunday. day. It's been called a homicide. The investigation ongoing. Crime scene tape still surrounding the quiet neighborhood. It was terrifying. At the time of the murders, there is just no crime like this in our town. It is a very small community in a sort of sea of wheat fields. So the shock waves that this sent out were incalculable. On campus, students were so afraid. I have an evening class that I go walk to in the dark, and I have my roommates take me to that now. They had no idea of why these students had been attacked and not them.

6:11I mean, the entire town felt this way. So tell me the first moment that you heard your name associated with these murders. Yeah, so it had been about 10 days or so from the murders. It was November 24th, 2022, which was Thanksgiving Day. The kids were getting sort of stir-crazy, so my husband, sister-in-law, and I decided to walk down to the park. It was a beautiful, very sunny day, crisp, cool air, and we're standing in the park, and I decided to check my work email, and there was a message from someone I didn't recognize. I opened it. She identified herself as an alumna and simply said, I think you should watch this.

6:57And there was a link. My spouse, he's an IT guy. So I have been known to click on questionable links in the past. So I showed him the link and said, do you think this looks okay to click on? He clicked on it. His eyebrows went up. He looked just shocked and he said, don't watch that. And then I watched it because, of course, I watched it. Tell me what it was. It was a link to a TikTok video in which a person I did not know at all said, This is the teacher who potentially had the four Idaho students killed. She's the one who ordered the execution. And it was a picture of me, my professional headshot, and my faculty biography on the screen.

7:44I was just in utter disbelief. My sister-in-law asked me, do I know this person? I have no idea who this is. I was so confused as to why anyone would think I would have anything to do with it. To be clear, you had no association with the victims, the murder victims. No, none at all. The only connection was you taught at the same university. Correct, but they were never in any of my classes. I wasn't their advisor. I didn't know any of them. This made no sense. None whatsoever. Was your natural inclination to kind of, it's the internet, and move on? Absolutely not. I think my first instinct was this could get bad very quickly.

8:28And maybe that's the historian in me. I know how quickly things can go from pure rumor to someone getting significantly harmed. The atmosphere in Moscow at the time was terrifying. Everybody was desperate for answers. There's still a person out there who committed four horrible, horrible crimes. I will tell you, we are looking at everyone. Every tip we get, every lead we get, there's no one that we're not going to look into. you. To all of a sudden have my name being shouted into a universe where somebody who committed these crimes is still walking around, where people are on edge and angry and upset and terrified.

9:14What do I do? How do I even attempt to address this? What were your options? I called and left a message with the Moscow Police Department. An officer called me back and I offered to be investigated. I said, whatever you need, just let me know. I also spoke with our campus security officers who advised me how to lock down my Facebook page. I didn't want to be telling a lot of people that it was happening, but as someone who did not have TikTok or really any social media, I didn't really know what steps I should be taking. When Rebecca Schofield, the one who merged with the four Idaho college students, see my videos, she's going to realize that it's very hard to outrun consequences of her actions.

10:02Within just a couple of days, there were many, many posts. I took a deeper look into Rebecca Schofield and Kaylee's relationship with each other. She suggested that I had had a romantic relationship with one of the female victims. Rebecca Schofield was being a sugar mama to Kaylee, giving her money. She really played into a lot of the stories about professors that society likes to read about. A very horrific, salacious story about abuse of power and of position. I think that story spoke to a lot of people. The videos were being watched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, if not millions, liked tens of thousands of times.

10:52She was posting multiple times a day. I did reach out to a friend who worked at the ACLU, and she suggested a lawyer who had worked on defamation cases. The hope was that we would send a cease and desist and get the videos taken down very quickly. You did send the cease and desist? Yes, we sent two. Were you able to get the postings down? No, she posted a video graphically describing what my lawyer and I could do with the cease and desist. She, that following weekend, posted a series titled something like The Truth About Rebecca Schofield, they started to be rapid fire videos. It was bad enough, I'm sure, to see the accusation, but what came from it?

11:42We saw pretty quickly the story filtering out into, honestly, some pretty scary areas of the internet. And I began getting phone calls to my personal cell phone, emails. It was terrifying to realize how exposed I was, how exposed my family was, that anyone could just find my personal cell phone number. I had no concept that that was even possible before this. Were you looking over your shoulder when you went out? Yes, I think I was particularly desperate, in part because I was going in for a full hysterectomy and I was so worried that I would be incapacitated in some way and not able to protect my family.

12:36How old were your kids? At the time, they were three and six. You know, I remember very distinctly having a conversation with my husband. We had always seeing ourselves as having a very balanced approach to risk, to letting our kids do things and live life. And all of a sudden, I was terrified of everything outside our doors. I think the hardest aspects of this was simply not being able to sleep out of fear that someone would come to harm us. And my kids' bedrooms were closer to the entrances to our home. And so I just sat in their bedrooms or walked up and down the hallway outside their rooms.

13:23Moscow gets very dark in November with the turning of the seasons, and it felt like everything ground to a halt, that every day felt just excruciating as we waited, as we tried to figure out what would happen next.

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15:47In the fall of 2022, history professor Rebecca Schofield embarked on a very different kind of research project than she was used to, figuring out who the stranger was who had labeled her a killer. Turns out, it was a woman living thousands of miles away in Texas. Her name was Ashley Gillard. How did you find out who Ashley was and what she was all about? We went to a couple of different places. One was my best friend, Chris, who was much more proficient in the digital world. And he helped us find her accounts and understand to some degree who she was. Tell me what you learned about her. This person presented herself as a psychic who could solve mysterious deaths through speaking with the spirits.

16:49You have to realize that I don't just do this for clout or because I have an opinion. I have a gift. I have the ability to read into minds, reading to past events, and into the future. And she was very invested in the notion of solving crimes that no one else had been able to solve and telling the quote unquote real story behind these deaths. And she mainly did this through tarot readings. And she had about 100 ,000 followers on TikTok when she fixated on me. There's nothing you've told me here that makes me understand how your name got pulled out of this digital hat. That should make everybody shudder that it could happen to any of us.

17:40Essentially, if your photo is on the internet, it could happen to you. The only reason you surfaced was because you were photographed in association with the school. Yes. So the TikToker did a tarot reading, and the tarot reading told her that the crime had to do with history. So she looked up the University of Idaho's history department and found my photo. Was there any evidence, anything you were studying or teaching somehow put you on the radar? Yes, in that when she first introduced me as having orchestrated the murders, she pointed out that I worked with the LGBTQ community with the International Gay Rodeo Association as part of my oral history project.

18:28And she made the leap that because I worked with LGBTQ people, then I must be LGBTQ myself. She didn't threaten you directly. No, she did not directly say in her videos that she was going to get on a plane and commit violence, but it did not feel outside the realm of possibility. Did part of you want to confront her? I don't think there's ever been a moment of time that I wanted to interact with this person at all. I just wanted her to leave me be. At some point, police feel compelled to comment on this, and they say, you're not a suspect. Correct. Police have yet to publicly identify any suspect, but now they're trying to clear up speculation around one person, a University of Idaho professor, Rebecca Schofield.

19:15Did that feel like, well, there's the way to the police. They would know and this will end it. We were very hopeful that the statement made by the Moscow police would end both her harassment and the public speculation, but it did really continue. I know at one point you said, I think you described it as like having a stone on my chest or something to that effect. Yeah, for me, this was a problem that was so present all of the time, every minute of every day. And that sort of constant hypervigilance and fear swelled to the proportions that it felt like my chest was about to cave in. When you have no ownership of your face and your name, and you're just a normal person who all of a sudden is starring in a fictional role, having fan fiction written about you that you have no ability to speak back to or to refute.

20:22It feels like just constantly screaming alone in your head. When you go through this, it is so shameful. It is so humiliating. Even though you know there's nothing to it. Even though I know that I am not that person that is in those stories, I have driven my whole life to be someone that people can be proud of. and to have something this salacious, this disgusting and horrific be what my parents and my high school teachers and my students and one day my kids will read about me. It is humiliating beyond words. You know, the injury that you described, the emotional injury, goes beyond just you. These are the two people who partnered to kill the four University of Idaho college students.

21:20Rebecca Schofield, associate professor and chair of the history department, and Kaylee's ex. Is there something you've given thought to? I spend a lot of time thinking about the way these young people's names were used and talked about and dragged through the mud. she said that I had conspired with this female victim's former boyfriend to commit the murders and this was just a young man wanting to live his life and dealing with grief and I can't imagine how difficult these years have been and how terrible that must have been for the families to not only have lost their children, but then to watch a feeding frenzy of speculation about who they were as people.

22:13You know, a lot of people confront the issue of what to do when someone calls them out online. It happens to me. I'm in the public eye, though, so it's something we have to deal with at some point. But how strongly did you ever feel that maybe if I ignore this, it will go away. Did that cross your mind? Absolutely. And it's probably the advice I was given the most from people I spoke to about this. Just ignore it. Just let it go. But I think as a historian, I believe in the truth. I believe in historical record. I believed there needed to be a place for me to simply say, this is not correct. Tonight, a TikTok creator facing a defamation lawsuit, Rebecca Schofield, a University of Idaho professor, is suing TikTok creator Ashley Giller.

23:06Defamation suit? Correct. A federal defamation suit filed in Idaho. For me, this was never just about clearing my own name or standing up and fighting for myself. It was about making this broader social statement that reminds people to have some care for these people who are suffering for the families, for the people who lost their lives, for their friends who are as scared and confused. And really, the entire town had this absolute moment of suspended terror that continues to shape the university and our region. So for me, the way in which My accuser was also accusing many other people of terrible, terrible actions was central to my decision to move forward with a legal case.

24:03When we come back, Rebecca tells me what it was like to come face to face with Ashley Gillard for the first time.

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25:03This message comes from Wise Business, the only account your business needs to scale globally. You're building a business with global ambitions, but hidden fees are eating into your margins. With Wise Business, you can pay overseas suppliers without exchange rate markups. Have customers worldwide get payment details in 22 currencies so you get more of each hard-earned payment without hidden conversion fees. Be smart. Get Wise Business. Download the app. T's and C's apply. Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that.

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26:07It took more than three years for Rebecca Schofield's defamation suit against Ashley Gillard to go to trial. During that time, Brian Koberger was arrested for the murders, but that didn't stop Gillard's relentless posts on TikTok and YouTube. Anxiety led her to implement her second plan, which is to call or contact Brian Koberger and ask him for help. I believe over the last three and a half years, she has probably posted close to 150 to 200 pieces of content, whether videos, interviews, websites, about me. You were still going to work. Yeah, absolutely. You show up, your classes, your faculty thing.

26:55Correct, yeah. I did not step away from my job in the classroom. Did you feel at times that people were whispering around you? Absolutely. Whispering in support or whispering in a negative way? I think that people were certainly concerned. There were a lot of whispers about just my mental health and how I was doing. And we also just know there were plenty of people whispering about, have you heard about that professor? and I have to address these false accusations with students every semester and every class. Do you just talk about it and put it on the table? A little bit of both. It's probably easier when they ask because, you know, we could stop the whispering.

27:42Exactly. Students Google their professors and this has been the first thing that comes up about me for years and will most likely continue to be the first thing that comes up for the rest of my career. I notice you don't use her name a lot. Is it still difficult to talk about her? Yes. One of my ongoing problems was that she always referred to me as Rebecca or Becca as if she knew me, as if we had any sort of relationship, which we simply do not. So that's one reason why I still struggle to just use her name, because I think it gives her a place in my life that I do not want her to have. This case goes to trial, and it was a jury trial.

28:37So the judge had already ruled this is indeed defamation. So the trial itself was just to set damages. Killer decided to act as her own attorney. Correct. In this case. So what was that like? I mean, you had to face her. I've given birth twice, and that was far easier than talking directly to this person who had spent years saying I had committed heinous crimes. It was extremely painful to go through that experience. But you got to make some points with her. I did. It was in the courtroom the very first time that I was able to speak about what I went through and to speak to a jury of strangers and simply tell them what had happened.

29:28Of course, there will always be things where you question, why didn't I say that? Why didn't I make that point? I was so inarticulate. I stumbled. I repeated myself. I think public speaking is exceptionally hard. I don't know if you know that. That's what I've heard. One of her defenses was that she believed her postings were true, and therefore it was unfair to hold her accountable. How do you respond to that? Yes, I think this fundamentally misunderstands the First Amendment. The First Amendment does protect our rights to speech and to our opinions. However, those need to be framed up front as opinions.

30:13So when she is going online and stating Rebecca Schofield is the killer, that is a statement of fact. Belief is not a carte blanche right to try to destroy somebody else's life, especially belief that has not been substantiated with any other form or any form at all of evidence. that is simply not how the First Amendment functioned and has not functioned since the founding of our country. You won the defamation suit. It is currently in appeals, but the relief of telling our story in front of an impartial jury and having them listen and understand, And to me, that felt like a win. That felt like such a massive weight was lifted off my soul.

31:10You won a$10 million judgment in this case. Do you think you'll ever see that$10 million? I honestly don't know. To be clear, you didn't ask for$10 million. No, we did not. We simply asked the jury, please, if you believe that we've been damaged, please do something to try to make her stop. and they made as strong of a statement as they could. The killer of those students is in prison. Correct. Is your name still out there, still being circulated in this context? It is in some places, and I still always have colleagues, friends, tell me about their mom called or their cousin called and asked if any of it is true.

31:52Because even if they think, oh, well, maybe she didn't commit a quadruple homicide, but perhaps she did have a relationship with a student. Those types of accusations stick. Is Ashley posting as well? Yes, she has posted after the trial. People are coming to my page to see my response or to get information regarding how I feel about the$10 million verdict that was rewarded to Rebecca Schofield. First, my thoughts are it's just slightly irritating because I was ready for this to be over. It feels like there's no end to this. I think that I am trying to make peace with the notion that I have done what I can do to ensure that the public record shows that I fought.

32:45But I don't think that there is fundamentally anything more that I can do to try to stop these fictions from persisting. Is sitting down for this podcast, is this part of your road back? I hope so. I felt like it was the right thing to do. I just want to garden and live in my small town and write, you know, hopefully cool books. I just want to teach history and spend time with my kids. But for me, at least for the next little while, I think that I have to be okay talking about my experience in hopes that maybe it will not change what is continuing to happen to me, but maybe it will help somebody else.

33:49Do you feel like you have witnessed the worst of human behavior? To some degree, yes, in that the words people wrote and sent are unutterable. To this day? Yeah, to this day. I mean, people still make comments online, still like videos, speculate. You mentioned kids. Have you been able to shield them from the worst of this to the best of your ability? I hope so. But at the end of the day, they will not be able to be shielded forever. Um, we have had to tell my son more and more as he's gotten older. This is being discussed around him at school, at, in our home. Um, but there will come a time when they simply have to know the full and ugly truth of all of it.

34:50You know, the more I read your story, the more I feel vulnerable personally. And I feel that everyone around us should feel vulnerable. What's the takeaway here? I think in today's media scene, social media, I mean, anyone can put forward a story and couch it as truth. And I think for everyone who is idly consuming these stories on TikTok, to just remember that other people's pain is not entertainment, that there are humans on the other side. I'm really glad you said that because, you know, somebody consumes this stuff. It has no power. It has no life of its own until we give it that power and a life on its own.

35:43I mean, that's how I see it. And when just this week someone stopped me and started telling me a story, and I realized, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. I try to caution them that, please, you know, I mean, look it up, do some fact-checking. And I think not being afraid of your own intellectual abilities, your own ability to go out and to check facts, to dig deeper, to just give people that benefit of your own independent, critical thought. That is where we need to go. I love at the beginning of our conversation how you describe your life before, you know, the life with the kids, the book, the university.

36:22Now looking back, you're in a life that has in some ways been cut in two. How do you see this second chapter now, your comeback, if you will? I think that I have lost a level of innocence that can never be recaptured. But what I can do is make proactive decisions to ensure that my friends, my family, my children are as protected as humanly possible, while also seeing that we have to live life. I really have tried to focus more on living, on being grateful that the worst case scenarios didn't happen and working on work that brings me joy. You are so great to share this story. I think it will resonate with a lot of people, spark hopefully some important conversations on this whole topic.

37:25Thank you so much for your time. One last note, we reached out to Ashley Gillard. She told us she still stands by her tarot card readings. In her appeals, she challenges the judges ruling that she defame Rebecca, saying there's no proof she knowingly made false statements and acted with malicious intent. As for Rebecca, she's back doing what she loves, writing, teaching, being a mom, simply trying to return to life as it once was. Next time on Before and After. Brittany Griner spent much of her childhood feeling different. Too tall, too deep-voiced, too easy a target. I wasn't your typical, I guess, stereotype little girl.

38:15Then she found her superpower, basketball. It took her from being a bullied kid in Texas to an Olympic champion and one of the most dominant female athletes in the world. But in February 2022, a small discovery inside her bag at a Russian airport changed everything. As soon as I saw that cartridge, my whole soul drops down to my feet. For the next 293 days, Brittany Griner was no longer a basketball star. She was a prisoner. It was the most disgusting I've ever felt in my life. I felt like I wasn't even a human.

39:08That's next time. Before and After with Lester Holt is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Dan Slepian and Liz Brown-Kurloff are the producers. Annalise Peterson is the associate producer. Brian Drew, Billy Ray, and Rich Platt are editors. Original music by John Estes. Jessica Fenton is head of audio production. Alexa Danner is head of audio. Paul Ryan is the executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer.

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