OSDE facing lawsuit seeking records related to appointment of controversial ‘Libs of TikTok’ influencer
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A nonprofit group is suing Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE), and controversial social media influencer Chaya Raichik, accusing them of violating Oklahoma’s Open Records Act and Open Meeting Act.
The Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice filed the lawsuit in Oklahoma County on Tuesday after the center says OSDE ignored its requests for public records related to Raichik’s appointment to an OSDE advisory.
Walters created the board in January 2020, he said, to review content in books available in public school libraries.
It was January 2024 when Walters began the month’s State Board of Education, announcing he had chosen Chaya Raichik, the New York woman behind a controversial Twitter account called ‘Libs of TikTok,’ to serve on the new advisory board.
“I do have a video message I want to play for everyone,” Walters said to begin the meeting. “This is a special message from our newly appointed member of our advisory council, Chaya Raichik.”
“We are going to take back our schools,” Raichik said in a video Walters played.
Her appointment was part of Walters’ crusade against so-called pornography he claimed had been plaguing school libraries in the state.
“We’re gonna remove pornography and inappropriate material and liberal indoctrination from schools,” Chaya Raichik said.
“[Raichik] been very helpful to us,” Ryan Walters later said in January 2024.
That announcement did not sit right with a large number of people, who argued Walters had never shown any evidence to validate his claims of porn being available in Oklahoma school libraries, and Raichik posed a danger to Oklahoma schools.
“Protect our kids!” a woman shouted during the January 2024 meeting.
On her social media, Raichik has gained millions of followers by reposting TikTok content, often from teachers, while making her own far-right commentary on it.
In 2023, she posted about a Union Public Schools librarian.
Walters shared the post while commenting, "Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it!"
After that, Union Public Schools campuses received a slew of bomb threats.
“You can associate her platform, Libs of TikTok, with 225 bombing threats across the United States,” then-Oklahoma State Rep. Mark McBride told News 4 in January 2024.
“My kid better not get a bomb threat at their school because of this!” another woman shouted at the Jan. 2024 meeting.
“It was really confusing to all Oklahoma advocates that work in education because she doesn’t have anything to do with education or books or anything like that,” said Coleen McCarty, an attorney with the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. “[Raichik] refers to herself as a stochastic terrorist… essentially someone who terrorizes other people intentionally on an intellectual basis. The people that follow her account call in bomb threats on the person. They, they stalk that person, they dox that person. It’s intentionally cruel and intentionally supposed to quell people’s speech about their beliefs or about things that they disagree with.”
McCarty wanted to know more about how Walters came to his decision to add Raichik to that library committee.
“We put in some Open Records Act requests to find out why she was added to it, who else is on the advisory council, what meetings they have had, and what decisions they have made,” McCarty said.
That was more than a year ago.
OSDE sent her group a confirmation email letting them know the request had been received.
But beyond that.
“We’ve never gotten any responses,” Coleen McCarty said.
They still do not have any of the records they requested.
Their months-long wait has raised eyebrows for former assistant Oklahoma Attorney General Tim Gilpin.
“The Open Records Act here in Oklahoma requires a reasonable time to respond,” Tim Gilpin said. “It expects the government official to use expedited and normal means to respond in a timely fashion.”
He says at this point, there’s really only one course of action to take.
“Typically, that the individual or the entity seeking the records goes to the courts and essentially argues that they’re not responding,” said Tim Gilpin.
That’s why Oklahoma Appleseed filed that lawsuit against Walters, Raichik, and OSDE in Oklahoma County District Court on Tuesday.
“We’ve alleged both open records and open meetings, act violations,” McCarty said. “This is not a party issue. This is a government transparency issue. We felt like Oklahomans deserve to know why something this sort of bombastic would be a part of our state government’s decision-making processes.”
News 4 reached out to OSDE with several questions for Walters.
Walters did not answer them, but instead, he issued a statement calling the lawsuit politically motivated and saying, in part, “OSDE… remains committed to transparency and compliance with all legal requirements.”