‘A KID WHEN SHE DID THIS’
U. ‘dream lost’ over 4-yr.-old slur vid
A high-school cheerleader’s college “dream” was shattered when a black classmate arbitrarily posted a years-old video of her saying the N-word, her lawyer said this week.
Mimi Groves, now 19, was kicked off the University of Tennessee’s cheer team and forced to withdraw before she could even make it to campus this year amid complaints from outraged alumni and students when another teen, Jimmy Galligan, posted the clip.
The incident gained national attention when it was detailed in a New York Times story over the weekend.
Groves’ lawyer accused the university of making a “rush to judgment.”
“Mimi was a kid when she did this,” Shan Wu told Fox News on Monday. “She’s appalled and having said that, she’s not trying to excuse [her actions] in any way.”
“What she lost was her dream,” the lawyer added. “Like many athletes, she had worked most of her young adult life for a shot at going to a great school and being on their team. That was taken away from her in what can only be described as a rush to judgment.”
Galligan, of Leesburg, Va., was in class at Heritage HS in Loudoun County last year when a friend texted him the video of Groves spitting out the racial slur.
“I can drive, n-----s!” Groves said in the clip while driving in traffic. She had sent the three-second clip to a friend through Snapchat in 2016.
Galligan, 18, whose mother is black and father is white, said he complained to school faculty but they ignored the video of the then-high-school cheerleading captain.
So he held onto the video until he found the right time to publish.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Galligan told the Times.
In June, Galligan posted the video on social media amid the George Floyd protests.
Around that same time, Groves, who was an incoming freshman at the University of Tennessee, posted on her Instagram urging her followers to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Times reported.
“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” a person who Groves didn’t know wrote in response to her public post.
Groves admitted her actions were inexcusable.
“At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” Groves told the Times.
“It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” she continued. “How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”