Head of Trumbull Diversity Committee says she has been threatened due to controversial Facebook post

The head of Trumbull's Diversity Committee says she has been threatened since making a controversial post on Facebook that prompted calls for her resignation.

News 12 Staff

Mar 5, 2021, 11:36 PM

Updated 1,319 days ago

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The head of Trumbull's Diversity Committee says she has been threatened since making a controversial post on Facebook that prompted calls for her resignation.
Tara Figueroa compared the Thin Blue Line symbol in support of police to the Confederate flag in a social media post before she was appointed to head up the town's Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.
Figueroa says she is adamant about not stepping down despite many calls for her to do so.
She says she is not against police and immediately took down the post once she realized how potentially offensive it could be.
Trumbull resident Cindy Penkoff has been echoing calls from the town's Republican Town Committee and police union for Figeroa to be removed from her post.
"If you are the head of a diversity committee, you don't make negative comments about any group at all. Your job is to bring people together, not push people away and cause a wedge," Penkoff says. "Tara needs to be removed from the committee, but at this point I feel like the committee itself is a complete failure. It has always been a committee looking for a problem and they don't function, so the committee itself should be disbanded and relooked at."
"You know, as a public servant, the Supreme Court upheld my right to have an opinion as a private citizen, and it is just so clear that this entire situation has been a concerted effort to further marginalize minority points of view," Figueroa says.
Figueroa says she's been threatened because of the controversy and does not feel safe. She says someone has threatened to burn a cross in front of her house.
Trumbull resident Wayne Winston says the backlash to Figueroa’s statement have gone too far. “You know, to have her home threatened, you know, that she is going to have a cross burned on her lawn, I mean, where are we,” Winston says. “Is this the ‘60s or 2021?”
He says a task force that’s only been in existence for a few months should not be destroyed by the first real debate to come along with it.
Trumbull First Selectman Vicki Tesoro says both parties could have worked the situation out face-to-face before facing a social media campaign that has done nothing but cause harm to everybody involved.