The CFO of GiveSendGo is defending his company after a woman accused of using a racial slur against a 5-year-old at a Minnesota playground went on to raise over $750,000 for herself through donations on the platform.
In an interview with NewsNation, CFO Jacob Wells defended Shiloh Hendrix, who was captured in a video appearing to call a young child the N-word after accusing him of trying to steal from her son, and has since raised over $750,000 in funds to “protect” her family.
Wells accused people of piling onto Hendrix after seeing the viral video, which was filmed on a playground in Rochester, Minn. on April 28, according to NBC News. The CFO said the public has adopted a “mob mentality,” which has “ruined so many people’s lives.”
“The boy was rummaging through her belongings, so it’s not like she just stepped into the situation unprovoked and called a young boy a term,” Wells claimed before adding that he doesn’t “condone calling people racial epitaphs [sic] and bad names at all.”
While he told NewsNation he was “bothered” by the video, he continued to defend Hendrix.
“Shiloh is going through a dark moment, just as much as this other family is, and we want to be a light in all of these moments,” Wells said.
“I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of association,” he continued. “When you start going down the road of cancellation and cancel culture, it actually brings the very things that we say that we’re against.”
Wells did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
The man who recorded the video, Sharmake Omar, told NBC he knows the family of the young boy, who is on the autism spectrum and “was visibly upset by the incident.”
The boy’s family launched their own fundraising campaign after the incident, local station KIMT reported, but have since closed it after raising more than $340,000 on GoFundMe.
Hendrix’s fundraiser sparked a protest on Monday, May 5, near Roy Southerland Playground, where the incident took place, according to KIMT. One anonymous protestor told the outlet, “It’s disturbing that this is even happening in Minnesota.”
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Hendrix launched her GiveSendGo fundraiser to raise money to help her family potentially “relocate” after the incident. While the site typically allows users to post a comment with their donation, GiveSendGo had to disable the comment function on Hendrix’s page after multiple contributors shared racist notes with their donations, according to The Washington Post.
In the most recent update posted Friday, May 9, to her GiveSendGo page, Hendrix thanked her “wonderful supporters,” writing that “Without their help, your donations, and the folks from Give Send Go, we would have been lost in the dark.”
Earlier this week, the Rochester Police Department announced that they had completed their investigation into the incident and passed their findings onto to the City Attorney’s Office to review for “a charging decision.”
