In defence of the grandmother who made up the KFC hoax.

Imagine this.

Your beautiful three-year-old daughter is playing quietly in the living room. You step away briefly. In the 90 seconds that you’re out of the room, three vicious pitbulls make their way into the house. They knock her down and drag her to the backyard. They begin mauling her. By the time you reach her, they have broken several of her delicate bones. They have ripped apart her gorgeous little face. One of her eyes is completely gone.

Thankfully, she survives the horrific attack but her injuries are extreme. She needs several surgeries. She can only be fed special formula through a tube. There will eventually be plastic surgery for her severe facial scarring, and probably a prosthetic eye.

But, your insurance isn’t great. You’re struggling to afford the formula. Her life may have been saved, but the gap has left you in a scary amount of debt. No financial help is available for the ‘cosmetic’ surgeries she needs. Your heart breaks as you think about her going through life with a severly disfigured face.

How far would you be willing to go to get your little girl the help she needs? What would you be willing to do to pay for the formula that feeds her? What would you be willing to do to pay for the medical care you can’t afford?

One family doesn’t have to imagine the above scenario – they’re living it.

You’ve probably read about Victoria Wilcher at some point over the last week. The three-year-old girl from Mississippi was attacked by her grandfather’s pitbulls in April. Her horrific injuries match the ones described in the scenario above. Her story was unknown to the public until last week, when her grandmother told the media that they had been kicked out of a KFC restaurant because Victoria’s face was ‘upsetting to other customers’.

The story garnered international attention. Victoria’s disfugured face and her family’s story of financial hardship moved people into action. KFC promised to investigate the incident and donated $30,000 to her medical bills. A further $130,000 in donation flooded into the family’s gofundme page. A plastic surgeon offered to operate on her face free of charge, and another offered to fit her with a prosthetic eye.

But, in what could hardly be called a shocking turn of events for a viral story on the internet, yesterday it was revealed that the KFC story wasn’t actually true. Reporters who investigated the incident found that not only were Victoria and her grandmother never kicked out of a KFC, they were never in the restaurant in the first place.

Cue massive internet outrage. Just as strongly as they had championed her family the week before, websites across the net began vilifying them for their deception, and people who donated to Victoria’s gofundme page began demanding their money back. Facebook pages have been started just so people have a place they can talk about how much they hate the family. Headlines like KENTUCKY FRIED HOAX have dominated the news stories.

But you know what my first reaction was when I found out Victoria’s grrandmother had lied to the media?

Good on her. Good. On. Her.

Victoria’s grandmother was desperate to help her grandaughter, so she took advantage of the internet media’s thirst for viral content to get Victoria’s story out there. Yes – she needed a gimmick to get attention, so she told a lie about her grandaughter being kicked out of a KFC. But guess what? That lie got Victoria on the news, and when people saw her story, they wanted to help her.

You know how many people wanted to help Victoria before the KFC story got her attention? Not many. Before she became an international headline, Victoria’s family had raised $595 for the medical bills they couldn’t afford. After the KFC story, that number hit $130,000.

The gimmick worked, and I really couldn’t care less that it was a lie. The KFC story may have put Victoria in the public eye, but people weren’t donating because she got kicked out of a KFC, they were donating because she’s a three-year-old girl who was the victim of an awful dog attack and she needed help. That fact hasn’t changed. Her face is still disfigured. Her eye is still gone. Her family is still struggling to pay for her medical care. People who are asking for their money back are chumps.

Even the KFC restaurant think so. They released a statement saying that although they uncovered no evidence the incident in their restaurant actually occured, they were still going to give Victoria the $30,000 they promised for her medical bills.

We’ve all drunkenly debated the ‘would you steal bread to feed your starving family?’ line at one point or another, and it’s generally agreed that moral lines are inevitably blurred when emotion and love enters the equation. But when it comes to family, and particularly children, moral relativism tends to go out the window. It’s impossible to say how you would react when a child you love needs help until they actually need it.

So before people begin demanding their money back and calling for the ‘evil’ family to be punished, they should probably take the ‘would you steal bread to feed your starving family’ line and trade it with ‘would you tell a lie to get the money you need to pay your daughter’s medical bills?’

Was it wrong to lie? Yes. But a three-year-old girl who’s been through a horific trauma is now going to get the best possible care. And I just can’t see how that isn’t a positive.