DeSantis Spreading False Libs of TikTok Claim Against Charlie Crist’s Running Mate: Report

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and the Florida Republican Party have attacked the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Karla Hernández, as having “protected a sexual predator for years” in a “false” smear campaign, reported Popular Information on Wednesday.

Reporters Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby detail how the allegations made their way from the right-wing Twitter account Libs of Tik Tok to a Florida GOP website to the Twitter account of DeSantis’s campaign Director of Rapid Response Christina Pushaw and eventually to DeSantis himself.

“They claim Hernández, as president of the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) union, ‘protected a sexual predator for years and accompanied him through numerous investigations into his sexual assaults of multiple students.’ This claim, Popular Information has learned, is false,” writes Legum and Crosby.

Libs of Tik Tok tweeted, only two hours after Democratic nominee for Gov. Charlie Crist announced Hernandez as his running mate, “She’s the president of a teacher’s union who covered up for a teacher who pled guilty to sexual assault of a student. There were allegations

against him for 12 YEARS & the union she was in charge of protected him.”

“Libs of Tik Tok provided no substantiation for these claims. (A Miami Herald article the account linked to does not support the allegations),” noted the report, which debunked the allegations first by simply looking at the timeline of when Hernandez became the head of the union versus when the allegations against the sexual predator were made:

Wendell Nibbs, a former middle school teacher, was arrested in November 2017 and pled guilty to child sexual assault in January 2020. The allegations against Nibbs date back to 2004, and it is appalling that he was able to remain a teacher for so many years.But it is false that Hernández “protected” Nibbs or “accompanied him through numerous investigations.” The known allegations against Nibbs span from May 2004 to May 2016. Hernández did not become president of UTD, which represents more than 28,000 educators, until May 2016.

To that they added an even more devastating point:

When an investigation into a teacher is criminal, UTD does not play any role, a union spokesperson told Popular Information. UTD confirmed that, after Hernández became president in 2016, UTD had no involvement with the investigation into Nibbs.

Furthermore, the report notes that the investigation that led to the arrest of Nibbs began in mid-2015, substantially before Hernandez became the head of the union.

“As president of UTD, Karla Hernandez Mats protected

a sexual predator for years and accompanied him through numerous investigations into his sexual assaults of multiple students at a Miami-Dade middle school. The rapist, Wendell Nibbs, was a high-ranking UTD member and strong supporter of Hernandez Mats,” declares the Florida GOP’s website, which also links to the Miami Herald article about Nibbs.

Legum and Crosby note that as the allegations against Hernandez failed to penetrate major media outlets, DeSantis himself voiced the debunked allegations.

“You do not put union politics ahead of middle school students who are in danger of being sexually abused,” DeSantis said on Tuesday.

“That’s disqualifying to be in any political office, much less Lieutenant Governor of Florida.”

DeSantis also called Nibbs, a former PE teacher, the union’s “top union henchman.”

The Crist/Hernández campaign denounced DeSantis’s comments as “a lie.”