Erin Mazzoni – who works for the campaign of Franklin, Tennessee Republican mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson – gave a speech in front of the Franklin Board of Mayor & Aldermen (BOMA) where she claimed that LGBTQ+ people are giving children buttplugs and training them on how to use them.
She said that she moved to Tennessee from Bucks County, Pennsylvania after an alleged buttplug incident, which she claimed caused the community to fall apart.
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“Our entire community up north fell apart, it was like watching a bad car accident for three years straight,” she told the BOMA in a work session earlier this year. Video of her speech has resurfaced online. She wore a t-shirt that said, “We the Parents.”
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“It started out as Pride coming in, and I thought everything would be OK,” she said as she cried. “And it ended with a Rainbow Room where eight- to 12-year-old kids were given butt plugs and dildos and trained.”
She was referring to the Lower Bucks Rainbow Room, an LGBTQ+ youth organization that offers weekly meetings in a church for LGBTQ+ youth ages 14 to 21, according to the group’s Instagram page.
“They just got a city grant for $630,000 to be able to do more training on children,” Mazzoni continued, referring to a state grant the group got last year to support LGBTQ+ youth that made no mention of “training” or sex toys. “It was horrendous!”
She then claimed that all her friends in Bucks County are leaving due to the LGBTQ+ youth group that meets once a week in a local church. “And it is a very good tax base. These conservatives are good tax-base people. It was absolutely horrible to watch.”
LGBTQ Nation couldn’t find any credible information online about the Rainbow Room “training” children to use buttplugs. We reached out to the church-based youth group for comment and will update if we receive a response.
But Mazzoni got several other verifiable facts wrong in her rant, including the age group that the Rainbow Room serves and the nature of the grant that they received. Moreover, she and her candidate, Hanson, have already made headlines for their alleged dishonesty in their campaign.
Hanson and Mazzoni allegedly used a picture of women from across the country that they took from social media without consent and claimed that the women in the picture supported Hanson’s candidacy. The photo was used in an August Facebook post by Hanson and showed a group of women that Hanson called “the Executive Women’s Club,” and she thanked them for “their invaluable support and encouragement.”
News Channel 5 then found out that the picture was taken in 2016 in Chicago and tracked down one woman in the picture, identified as “April.”
“I am right in the front with the little top-knot bun and a little American flag sweater,” she said, adding that she does not even know who Hanson is, much less support her.
“I’m wondering how this person doesn’t have other photos of other friends or actual supporters,” April said. “It’s a really far stretch to dig up a photo from social media from seven years ago of just what was a really delightful brunch of a group of women who just had met.”
Another woman in the picture said that she and her friends were “appalled, absolutely appalled” that their picture was used to show support for Hanson.
When confronted with this, Hanson said that the women in the photo are “all my friends that have relocated to Nashville, Brentwood, and Franklin, and they all support me,” despite the women in the photo saying otherwise.
Mazzoni went even further and got mad at News Channel 5 for even asking about the picture, calling investigating it “stalking.”
“This is not appropriate towards a woman, Phil,” Mazzoni told Phil Williams, the reporter. “We are doing this in the light, and we are doing this with God on our side.”
