76-year-old actress Pam Grier appeared on The View on Monday, where she recounted a rather questionable memory during their Martin Luther King Jr. Day episode.
During her Air Force family upbringing, she claimed to have witnessed racism by seeing the aftermath of lynchings of black people in Columbus, Ohio. Grier recalled her mom trying to protect her from seeing lynched bodies hanging from trees, and claimed that white families would also be lynched for supporting black families.
“My mom would go, ‘don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,’ and she would pull us away because there’s someone hanging from a tree,” claimed Grieg. “And they have a memorial for it now where you can see where people were and left. And it triggers me today to see that a voice can be silenced and if a white family supported a black, they’re going to get burned down or killed or lynched as well.”
Despite her claim that this happened during her childhood, skeptics online pointed out that records from the Equal Justice Initiative show no lynchings in Columbus or Franklin County after 1950, with Ohio’s last confirmed case around 1911 in Cleveland—making her toddler age at that time period a mismatch.
Multiple commentators, like Matt Walsh, questioned the timeline. However, none of the hosts on The View‘s panel pushed back on Grier’s claims.
The last lynching in Ohio was in 1911.
Grier was born in 1949. https://t.co/r2CmODx9az
— Rick Shaftan — Neighborhood Research and Media (@Shaftan) January 20, 2026
In order for this story to be even vaguely plausible, this woman would need to be well over 100 years old https://t.co/T463kBaroG
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 20, 2026
Maybe we should skip past the obvious lie here and drill down on the reason so many black celebrities do this. Claim some sort of bigotry they did not actually experience. From LeBron to Oprah to Michelle Obama to many, many more.
Why is this a thing? https://t.co/zp47uBwCh4
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) January 20, 2026
Grier’s recently published memoir details other hardships from her childhood but omits any mention of this incident. Grier has not responded to the online debate about her memory since her appearance on The View.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but someone please tell Pam Grier that black people and fentanyl are killing 100x more black people than when she lived in Columbus.
She looks good for being 250 years old though. https://t.co/Syn2BxVtUK
— Hugh Jastle (@hughjastle69) January 20, 2026
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