A woman who hunted down and destroyed the life of a private figure who once wore blackface to a Halloween party in an episode widely seen as the peak of cancel-culture zealotry later resurfaced briefly in the Biden administration.
Lexie Grüber-Pérez, who attended a 2018 party thrown by then-Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles despite not being invited, complained two years later that she had seen a woman wearing blackface there. Although the woman, later identified as Sue Schafer, wore blackface in an effort to criticize racism, the complaint from Grüber-Pérez prompted a front-page article and the cancelation of Schafer and possibly Toles. The article shocked people across the political spectrum with its vindictive and malignant tone, and was described as the “zenith of cancel culture.”
Grüber-Pérez began working as a senior advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services in September 2021, The Daily Wire has learned. According to her LinkedIn profile, which pictures her with Biden, she left the job after six months and now lives in England.
“Now is the time to address the stark racial disparities, acknowledge the history of criminalizing neglect, and move towards the new systems of care that prevent the need for family separation,” she said on Facebook after taking the job, according to The Imprint, a publication which chronicles the youth human services industry.
The strident racial activism of Grüber-Pérez was on full display at the 2018 Halloween party after she saw Schaefer, whom she did not know and who had no position of public prominence. Witnesses said she yelled at the tearful woman, who tried to explain that the costume was criticism of Megyn Kelly’s purported minimization of the practice, a controversy that was in the news that week. Nearly two years later, Gruber sought out the stranger’s identity, refused to accept an apology from her, and bullied the Post into writing the 3,000 word article about the woman’s misstep, published in June 2020.
The cancellation in the Post was so vengeful that it attracted almost uniform backlash for weeks. The story seemed to be entirely driven by Grüber-Pérez, who emailed Toles out of the blue to complain about the incident at his long-ago party. She demanded to know the name of the guest, and when Toles declined to give up Schaefer’s identity to a stranger, Grüber-Pérez accused him of “a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice.”
Toles’ five-decade career came to an end a few months later. Although he offered to connect the two so that Schafer could offer a private apology—which Schafer had done repeatedly to Toles at the time— Grüber-Pérez refused.
Grüber-Pérez, who is Puerto Rican, wrote that she had “a hard time believing that you are genuine in remorse. . . . I do not feel comfortable reaching out to a woman who publicly harassed me and my friend — simply because we are not white. This happened in public — and so I want a public apology.”
She then took the story to Post editors, and appeared to push it so forcefully that it resulted in the story which featured a portrait of Grüber-Pérez looking heroic. Then, after the story was universally greeted with disgust, the Post gave in to Grüber-Pérez’s demands that it unpublish the picture she had willingly posed for–while leaving up the picture of Schafer.
Even the leftist former Post reporter Wesley Lowery, who left the paper over his self-professed desire to conduct less objective journalism, was appalled by the over-the-top cancellation.
“Giving a massive amount of attention to a dumb incident involving private citizens would invariably do negligible good and cause massive amounts of harm,” he told New York magazine.
The left-leaning magazine was shocked by the cruelty of using a major newspaper to attack a repentant, liberal, private figure for a years-old petty offense.
“The Post twice violated its own editorial policy in an apparent effort to appease Gruber and Prince: reporting on the incident even though the resulting story violated the Post’s editorial standard about relevance, then removing an editorial component of the story in violation of the Post’s editorial standard about take-down requests,” it wrote in an article titled Why Did The Washington Post Get This Woman Fired?.
Prince refers to Lyric Prince, a friend of Grüber-Pérez’s who is a black woman who is more than six feet tall but said she felt “unsafe” because of Schafer, and described Schafer as bullying her even though witnesses said they only saw Schafer on the receiving end of screams and insults. Ironically, Prince later lost her job for calling someone a “fag” in the company of a transgender person, according to her blog.
Grüber-Pérez, who could not be reached for comment, has a track record of seemingly absurd cancellations. In college, she forced the cancellation of a charity event raising money for orphans, because she said that the Mexican food-themed fundraiser was cultural appropriation.
The Imprint suggested that the Biden administration position Grüber-Pérez held was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), a law which allows outside interests to pay people to work as government employees. HHS declined to describe the funding mechanism to the outlet. Casey is a big-dollar, far-left activist group.
In January, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) wrote to HHS concerning possible abuses of IPA in HHS that could allow former Google CEO Eric Schmidt improper influence on government. Politico reported last year that the “Ex-Google boss helps fund dozens of jobs in Biden’s administration,” suggesting that Schmidt could use the mechanism to embed his pet projects, such as artificial intelligence, in government.
Under the controversial law, local and state governments and nonprofits are permitted to fund federal positions under certain limited conditions. Grassley suggested that the Schmidt funding could exploit a loophole, with an LLC controlled by Schmidt using the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists (FAS) as a pass-through.
“Within the White House, officials have sometimes viewed FAS and Schmidt Futures interchangeably, as the dual vehicles for the funding of jobs,” Politico reported.
Casey is a nonprofit foundation funded by the estate of the UPS founder, so it is not serving as a pass-through for a corporation. But it is a radical leftist group, and the federal government allowing it to fund jobs raises the risk that partisan billionaires can essentially buy government–providing staff to tackle policy favored by the far-left that the federal government otherwise would not have undertaken.
Casey has long been the subject of significant political drama; the UPS founder entrusted his money to a conservative board for the purpose of building orphanages, but board members watched in shock as staff hijacked it for far-leftist purposes, and it was soon no longer running any orphanages at all.