What specific claims did Candace Owens make about the content of the voicemails in the Stamford lawsuit?
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Executive summary
Candace Owens has consistently said that, as a Stamford High senior in 2007, she received multiple threatening voicemails that contained “death threats,” “graphic racist epithets,” and other threatening language; her family settled a lawsuit with the Stamford Board of Education for $37,500 over the school’s response [1] [2]. Owens’s own accounts describe “a series of voicemails” from a group of boys — reportedly four teens in a car, one of whom was later reported to be the mayor’s son — that she called “the most horrific that I have ever heard uttered against another human being” [3] [4] [2].
1. Owens’s core claim: threatening, racist, even death-threat voicemails
Owens’s public descriptions — in a 2016 open letter and subsequent interviews — say anonymous boys called her cell phone one night and left “a series of voicemails” that were threatening, included racial slurs and graphic death threats, and changed her life thereafter [3] [5] [2]. Local reporting from the time and later pieces reiterate that the messages included death threats and “racial and sexual slurs,” language the Owens family used in the May 2007 federal suit alleging the schools failed to protect her [1] [6].
2. Quantity and source as described: “a group,” “four boys in a car,” and a mayor’s son
Owens and local outlets consistently describe the callers as a group of teens. Multiple articles state the voicemails were left by “four boys in a car” or “a group of anonymous boys,” and contemporary coverage noted that one of the youths questioned by police was the son of then-Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy [4] [3] [7]. Reporting also states police analyzed voicemail tapes as part of the investigation [8].
3. Legal outcome and what that does—and doesn’t—prove
The family sued the Stamford Board of Education, alleging the district failed to protect Owens after she reported the harassment; the board agreed to pay $37,500 to settle the federal lawsuit in January 2008 [1] [2]. Settlement and payment are documented in local reporting [1]. Available sources do not mention a criminal conviction tied to the content of the voicemails; contemporaneous coverage reports arrests and investigation activity but does not report a final criminal finding in the public record provided here [8] [7].
4. How Owens has framed the content over time
In her 2016 open letter and later interviews, Owens emphasized the extremity of the language — calling the words “the most horrific that I have ever heard uttered against another human being” — and linked the experience to a lasting personal and political impact [3] [2]. Local profiles and later summaries repeat her characterization: threatening voicemails that included racial epithets and death threats [5] [6].
5. Independent reporting and consistent elements across sources
Local newspapers (The Stamford Advocate, The Hour, CTPost, Newstimes) and AP reporting consistently note three elements: the voicemails were threatening and racist; the family sued the Board of Education and settled for $37,500; and the incident involved multiple teen callers, one of whom was publicly reported to be the mayor’s son [2] [1] [4] [6]. These consistent elements establish what Owens and contemporaneous reporting stated about the voicemail content and context [2] [1] [4] [6].
6. Limits of the reporting: forensic details and verbatim transcripts are not published
The available reporting notes police sent tapes of the voicemails for forensic analysis, but the sources here do not publish verbatim transcripts or reproduce the exact language of the messages [8]. Therefore, while multiple outlets report Owens’s description of the voicemails as “death threats” and “graphic racist epithets,” the precise wording and forensic findings are not present in the documents provided [8].
7. Competing perspectives and implications cited in coverage
Coverage recorded disagreement and political fallout: critics later pointed to Owens’s lawsuit and settlement while disputing her public positions on race — a tension repeated in national coverage of Owens’s later career [2] [9]. Local reports also include the school’s alleged delay in disciplining students and the family’s contention that a political connection may have influenced the response [1] [6].
8. Bottom line for readers
Candace Owens’s specific public claims about the Stamford voicemails are consistent across her own accounts and local news reporting: multiple anonymous boys left a series of voicemails that contained death threats, racial epithets and other threatening language; her family sued and settled for $37,500 [3] [5] [1]. Available sources do not publish the voicemail transcripts or definitive forensic conclusions about the messages’ exact wording or any criminal convictions tied to them [8].