The parents of a Tennessee three year-old tell People Magazine that their daughter has become unhealthily fixated on and fearful of John Wilkes Booth ever since a November trip to Washington, DC where the family’s stops included the museum at Ford’s Theater and the Lincoln Memorial.
Cassie Litton tells the lifestyle publication – which bills the article as an “exclusive” – that while daughter Lainey’s mentions of Booth are not “an everyday occurrence,” it does “tend to find its way into just our day-to-day conversations,” adding that on a recent Sunday the family were attending church services “and the preacher was talking about how Jesus loves us. She looked at me and she said ‘Mommy, I love Jesus.’ I said ‘That’s awesome. I’m glad you do.’ She said, ‘Jesus loves us.’ I said, ‘That’s right.’ She said, ‘You know who we don’t love? I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘John Wilkes Booth.’”
The small girl’s obsession with Booth has found its way into her bedtime as Cassie says occasionally she has to reassure Lainey that the pro-Confederate actor is not “in her room” or “under her bed” at night. “She was afraid to lie in her bed one night. I said, ‘It’s okay. You’re safe. You’re in your room, nobody can bother you in your own house.’ She said, ‘Yeah, but what if John Wilkes Booth is under my bed? Like, what if he’s hiding?’ She said, ‘What if he comes to take my stuffed animals away?’”
Eventually further down People Magazine’s article it becomes apparent how the family ended up being interviewed for the “exclusive”: Cassie at some point in the last six months posted a Tiktok video of Lainey talking about Booth, where it got 14.2 million views. Eventually the post caught the attention of the staff at Ford’s Theater, who sent the family free merch. Which means that of course in this day and age you can’t rule out that the whole thing is staged and the girl’s being coached into the obsession, but at the same time it does seem more than idiosyncratic enough to have genuinely come from the mind of a child. Sometimes youngsters just come up with really weird, funny shit.