Activist Shaun King took to social media on Wednesday night claiming that his kids were targets of a false child abuse complaint investigated by New York Child Services (ACS).
King said that he was preparing to attend a musical his daughter was starring in when he received a call from his doorman at his apartment building that someone was there to check on his kids, which immediately raised red flags for him.
“We don’t hire and have never hired outside childcare for our kids. The kids were all with me,” he wrote. “I knew immediately that something was very wrong. I was confused and even wondered if they had simply called the wrong person. I asked my doorman again who was there. He said ‘a woman is here and she wants to talk to you about childcare for your kids.’”
King asked the doorman to put the woman on the phone, who knew the names of his children. Upon speaking to her, King was notified that she worked for New York Child Services and that someone alleged that King and his wife “abandoned [their] children and allowed them to do drugs.”
He said he spoke to a supervisor who told him that the report was filed by an anonymous person. King declined to have anyone from ACS meet with his kids, he wrote.
“Under no circumstances will anybody from the NYPD or New York Children’s Services be speaking to anybody in my family,” he said. “I’m going to have to be in violation of New York law, but you will not force my children to participate in a single interview over a false complaint. PERIOD.”
King’s wife, Rai King, wrote in a Medium post on Thursday about the incident saying that a “White supremacist” put her family in danger.
“Some white supremacist or disgruntled person would waste the city’s limited resources to randomly call in false information that severely puts my family in harm’s way, and drive workers away from their important work, truly baffles me,” she wrote. “We live in a sick and depraved world.”
