Geographers Association Facing Internal ‘Blowback’ after Inviting Fired Florida Health Dept. Staffer to Speak at Conference

The invitation of a controversial so-called “whistleblower” to a prime speaking spot at an upcoming geographers association meeting is causing divisions among its members.

Rebekah Jones, 31, a former staffer at the Florida Department of Health who was fired in May after she claims she refused to manipulate the state’s COVID-19 data, is slated to speak in April at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers. According to a schedule of events on the association’s website, Jones will be giving “a geographer’s perspective on high-stakes public science.”

But Jones’s inclusion on the bill, which also includes a keynote speech by an actual award-winning scientist and astronaut, hasn’t gone over well with all of the association’s members.

While Jones claims she’s been targeted for refusing to manipulate data to justify Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s plan to reopen the state, Florida officials say she was justifiably fired for insubordination and for “multiple performance issues.” Jones, who has been fired from at least three jobs in recent years, has provided no evidence to back her claim that state leaders urged her to cook the COVID-19 books. And in January she was arrested, accused of hacking into the state’s emergency messaging system and urging other civil servants to “speak up.”

“It’s kind of a fraught issue at the moment,” Oscar Larson, the association’s meeting director, said of Jones’s speaking role when reached by National Review on his phone. “We’ve had some blowback from some of our members who haven’t wanted her to be a speaker.”

Larson declined to speak further, directing a reporter to the association’s executive director, Gary Langham, who did not respond to an email or a phone message this week.

When reached on her cell phone, Lisa Schamess, the association’s spokeswoman, said “I am not on the record with you, and we are not going to be talking with you today.” She then hung up. Jones did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

In a description of Jones plugging her speech on April 9, the association essentially whitewashes the controversy surrounding her firing, runs with the narrative that she is a data science truth-teller, and makes no mention of her arrest, criminal charges, or messy personal background.

“Jones was fired in a clash with supervisors on how best to keep that data fair, accurate and transparent,” according to the description. “Thrust into the spotlight and called out personally by Florida’s governor, Jones was undeterred and used her public platform to establish an independent Florida COVID-19 geospatial data dashboard.”

Jones will appear at the AAG’s annual conference, featuring nearly virtual 1,000 sessions, alongside a number of academics who have authored papers on the intersection of geography and social justice — including “Towards a post-humanistic understanding of borders,” “‘The Truth and White B******t’: Examining Urban Renewal, Gentrification, and the Pandemic,” and “(Re)Imagining Transformative Livelihoods through Feminist Geographies.”

This isn’t Jones’s first controversial invitation to speak at a national conference.

In early March, she was slated to be a panel speaker at an Investigative Reporters & Editors conference for computer-assisted reporting. But she got the axe when the organization determined that “some unresolved issues” regarding her case would make it difficult to maintain the panel’s focus.

Jones first made headlines in May, when she sent an email to a public listserv announcing that she had been removed from the team overseeing Florida’s COVID-19 data “for reasons beyond my control,” and suggested that “accessibility and transparency” would suffer in her absence.

“After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing” the data, she wrote, according to media reports.

Jones soon revealed she had been fired from her job as a geographic information systems manager with the health department. She told a local TV station she had refused to “manually change data to drum up support for” DeSantis’s plan to reopen the state.

DeSantis insisted her firing was a “nonissue,” which to his critics was just evidence of a coverup.

Overnight, Jones became a minor celebrity and a heroine to leftwing “DeathSantis” haters. She appeared on national TV, amassed an army of more than 380,000 Twitter followers, launched her own COVID-19 tracker, and raised a half a million dollars online. A recent glowing Cosmopolitan profile likened her to a “pandemic cult hero, a sort of Floridian Fauci.”

But soon after the initial headlines, Jones’s story — and her credibility — started crumbling.

Regarding Jones’s claim that she’d been directed to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen,” emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times showed Jones had objected to an order by the state’s I.T. director to disable the ability to export data from a state dashboard, at the request of the state epidemiologist.

According to the email, the purpose of disabling the export function was so it could be verified and matched to other sources. “This is the wrong call,” Jones replied in an email to the request, before complying. Less than an hour later she was given the go-ahead to re-enable the data.

Dr. Shamarial Roberson, Florida’s deputy health secretary, told National Review in May that requests to take down and verify data are common.

“That data is checked for quality assurance to ensure that it is correct,” she said. “If the state epidemiologist made the determination that a data field wasn’t properly approved through the approval process, she has the discretion to take something down and quality review it.” Jones also has been accused of misreading data, and combining deaths of Florida residents and non-residents who die of COVID-19 in the state, which is against CDC guidelines.

As for her qualifications, media reports that described Jones as a “data scientist” and the “architect” of Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard were wrong. Jones isn’t a data scientist. She double majored in geography and journalism, and was enrolled in a geography Ph.D. program at Florida State University. Jones herself has acknowledged she’s not a data scientist. And she was not the architect of the Florida dashboard. The department relied on a dashboard built by ArcGIS, a map-making software use by Johns Hopkins University.

Since her initial claims, Jones’s personal life – including multiple run-ins with the law — has come under scrutiny as well. Over the last five years, Jones has been arrested multiple times, and accused of trespassing, battering a police officer at Louisiana State University, cyber-stalking a Florida State University student with whom she’d had an extramarital affair, stealing his phone, and posting explicit photos of him online. Jones was fired from both LSU and FSU.

In December, Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents executed a search warrant at Jones’s home, and seized computer equipment as part of an investigation into an unauthorized breach of a state emergency messaging system.

Investigators had traced an unauthorized message sent through the system – “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” – to Jones’s IP address.

It took 20 minutes for Jones to open the door for the officers. She later claimed that they had pointed guns at her face and at her kids. FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen said in a statement that “at no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home.”

In a tweet, Jones said FDLE agents had, in fact, taken “evidence of corruption at the state level.”

“This is DeSantis. He sent the gestapo,” she wrote.

Jones turned herself in to law enforcement in January, and was arrested on one count of “offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices,” a third-degree felony. She was sick when she turned herself in, and later tested positive for COVID-19.