What did Candace Owens allege about the voicemails in her Stamford school lawsuit?
Executive summary
Candace Owens alleged that, while a senior at Stamford High School in 2007, a group of boys called her cell phone and left multiple threatening, racist voicemails — described by her as including death threats, graphic racist epithets and other slurs — an episode that led her family to sue the Stamford Board of Education and ultimately accept a $37,500 settlement from the district [1] [2] [3].
1. What Owens said about the voicemails — the claim in her own words
Owens has consistently said that one night she was watching a movie when “a group of anonymous boys called my cell phone and left me a series of voicemails,” and that the messages included the “most horrific” language she had ever heard, describing them as threatening, racist and life‑threatening in nature [1] [3]. Local reporting and Owens’s later profiles reiterate that she accused classmates of leaving voicemails that threatened to kill her and were filled with graphic racial epithets [4] [5].
2. Legal action and outcome — how the school board responded
Owens and her father sued the Stamford Board of Education in 2007, alleging the district “knowingly failing and refusing to protect” her from continued harassment after the voicemail threats; the school system settled the federal lawsuit for $37,500 in January 2008, according to contemporaneous reporting [2] [6]. Reports say the family informed the school of the threats and identified the callers to police and school officials, and that arrests and an investigation followed [2] [7].
3. Details reported about the callers and investigation
Multiple local accounts say the voicemails were left by several white male classmates — in some pieces described as four boys riding in a car — and one of the youths questioned by police was identified in reporting as the son of Stamford’s then‑mayor, Dannel P. Malloy; authorities sent voicemail tapes for forensic analysis [8] [9] [7]. Available sources do not provide exhaustive court transcripts or the full forensic results in these files; they report arrests, questioning and the family’s civil settlement [7] [2].
4. How the episode has been used in later coverage and Owens’s narrative
Owens has invoked the episode repeatedly in her public life as formative — saying it “changed” her life and influenced her politics — and she framed the school’s delayed or inadequate response as partly motivated by one caller’s political family ties [1] [4]. News outlets and profiles cite her public statements and the settlement as factual background when covering her later comments and career [3] [5].
5. What the sources agree on and where reporting is limited or varies
Contemporary and retrospective sources agree Owens received multiple threatening, racist voicemails as a high‑school senior, that the family sued the school district, and that a $37,500 settlement was paid [2] [6] [3]. Reporting varies on some specifics — e.g., exact number and length of messages, precise wording of the voicemails, and which individuals ultimately faced criminal charges — and publicly available articles here do not publish the full voicemail transcripts or detailed court filings to corroborate every detail [10] [7].
6. Competing perspectives and implicit agendas in coverage
Local outlets reported the incident as an apparent hate‑crime episode against a student; Owens and her legal team framed the school’s inaction as negligence, noting a perceived influence because a caller was the mayor’s son [2] [8]. Later national political coverage has sometimes invoked the episode to challenge or defend Owens’s public claims about racism — outlets sympathetic to Owens stress her status as a validated victim (citing the settlement), while critics sometimes question elements of the broader narrative; the materials provided here document Owens’s account and the settlement but do not include exhaustive third‑party adjudication of every contested fact [3] [11].
7. What is not found in current reporting supplied here
The provided sources do not include full voicemail transcripts, forensic lab reports, comprehensive police case files, or trial records that would establish every word left on Owens’s phone or the criminal outcomes for each named individual; they also do not include a definitive judicial finding on every factual dispute raised in accounts [7] [10]. For those documents, court records or police files would need to be consulted beyond the pieces supplied above.
8. Bottom line for readers
Available reporting shows Owens alleged multiple threatening, racist voicemails that she says included death threats and epithets, that her family sued the Stamford Board of Education over the school’s handling of the harassment, and that the district settled for $37,500 — facts reported by local outlets and repeated in national profiles [2] [1] [3]. The public record shared here confirms the core allegations and the settlement but does not contain full forensic or court documentation to resolve every detail about the messages or subsequent criminal prosecutions [7] [10].