An online fundraiser has been launched to pay for security for Black Lives Matter activist Zyahna Bryant — whose partnership with Dove to promote “fat liberation” sparked controversy after she was accused of getting a white student expelled over “misheard” comments.
The GoFundMe — which had raised nearly $10,000 by Sunday – was created last week by Erica Chapman, a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who claims she is Bryant’s cousin.
“Zyahna has been receiving hate mail and threats for YEARS, and recently they have become worse,” she wrote on the GoFundMe page.
Chapman said that Bryant, a community organizer and student activist studying at the University of Virginia, had faced increasing threats since she announced last month that she was partnering with Dove Beauty to promote “fat liberation.”
“Sadly, in today’s national climate with so many angry, violent and unpredictable people, being a visible, outspoken advocate and activist comes with significant risks,” Chapman wrote.
“Zyahna is currently a graduate student and we want to ensure that she is able to continue all of the work that she is doing in the classroom and in the community. We do not want to allow these racist attacks to take away from that,” she added.
“Please help Zyahna’s friends and family support her by ensuring she’s SAFE and protected as she continues her important work assisting and elevating marginalized people and communities.”
The nature of the threats against Bryant was unclear. It also wasn’t known was kind of security measures she may be receiving.
The Post reached out to Bryant and Chapman for comment Sunday.
The fundraiser, which had netted $10,050 of its $15,000 goal as of Sunday, comes nearly one month after Bryant announced her partnership with Dove in late August.
In a video posted to her Instagram page, the 22-year-old said: “My belief is that we should be centering the voices and the experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times.”
“So when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, I think about centering the voices of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body.”
She captioned her video by saying, “Fat liberation is something we should all be talking about … Tell us what Fat Liberation means to you using the hashtag #SizeFreedom and tagging @dove to share your story.”
It was later revealed that Bryant pushed University of Virginia administrators to get white student Morgan Bettinger expelled from campus over comments she later admitted she may have misheard — prompting several conservatives to say online they would boycott Dove products.
Former FOX host Megyn Kelly also discussed the controversy on her podcast, saying, “Apparently Dove doesn’t have access to Google, because a simple Google search would have shown Dove that she’s a deeply problematic person.
“This is the person that tried to ruin the life of a white student at the University of Virginia — she tried to actually ruin this young person’s life by trying to get her expelled from the college by falsely claiming tat this young white woman had made comments about black people being ‘speed bumps’ at a BLM riot or protest in the face of the police,” Kelly said.
“I couldn’t care less about her fat body,” Kelly said. “It’s more her anorexic mind that upsets me. And this partnership must end or Dove must get the Anheuser-Busch treatment,” she added, referring to the parent company of Budweiser, which has seen its stocks plummet since it partnered with transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney.
Billionaire Elon Musk called the situation “messed up.”
Dove and its parent company, Unilever, have yet to publicly discuss the controversy.
The saga began when Bettinger mistakenly drove down a street in Charlottesville, where some Black Lives Matter activists were protesting in the summer of 2020.
She told Reason magazine she saw a dump truck partially blocking the road, but because the street was not completely closed off, she continued driving.
When she realized the road was actually being blocked off from traffic, Bettinger said, she decided to park her car and see what was going on.
As she passed by, Bettinger said, the truck driver began talking to her, and the two had a brief conversation. Bettinger says she remembered telling the truck driver something along the lines of, “It’s a good thing that you are here because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps,” trying to praise his efforts to block traffic.
The driver later corroborated Bettinger’s remark to local cops.
But Bryant overheard part of the conversation and tweeted that Bettinger said the protesters “would make ‘good speedbumps’” along with a video showing Bettinger backing down the street in her car while Bryant and several other protesters followed.
“She then called the police and started crying, saying we were attacking her,” Bryant claimed.
The tweet was quickly shared more than a thousand times, and internet sleuths soon identified the driver as Bettinger.
Her pro-police social media posts, and the fact that her late father had worked as a police officer, only seemed to irritate people more, according to the Daily Mail.
Just one day later, Bryant began demanding that school administrators expel Bettinger.
“EMAIL these UVA deans now to demand that Morgan face consequences for her actions and that UVA stop graduating racists,” she tweeted.
Bryant herself filed a complaint with the University Judiciary Committee, a student-run disciplinary system, alleging Bettinger had threatened students’ health and safety.
It found Bettinger guilty of making a legitimate threat against the protesters, despite being unable to prove Bryant’s claims about her intentions.
The jurors ruled that even saying the words in a harmless manner during a protest merited punishment, according to documents obtained by Reason magazine.
Bryant also filed a complaint with the school’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, in which she claimed Bettinger repeated the statement five times and had discriminated against her due to her race.
The EOCR office found that three of the five accusations could not be corroborated, and a report found Bryant most likely did not hear Bettinger’s comments firsthand after no eyewitnesses were able to corroborate her version of events.
Bettinger eventually graduated from UVA but with a permanent mark on her record, Reason reported.