Preview: Rebecca Scofield on Before & After with Lester Holt

The first time Rebecca Scofield heard her name connected to the murders of four University of Idaho students, she was checking work email. A stranger had sent her a link. She showed it to her husband, an IT guy, and asked if it looked safe to click. He clicked. His eyebrows went up. He looked shocked. "Don't watch that," he said. "And then I watched it," Scofield tells Lester Holt, "because of course I watched it." The video was a TikTok post in which someone she had never met claimed that Scofield—a history professor—had potentially orchestrated the killings.

How a False Accusation Spreads

The accusation came roughly ten days after the actual murders in November 2022, when four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in a rental house near campus. Scofield, who teaches at the University of Idaho, had no connection to the case. But a TikTok influencer with a substantial following had decided, based on nothing concrete, that Scofield was somehow involved. The video went viral. Within days, Scofield's name was being shouted into a digital universe where the real killer was still at large, where people were terrified and angry and looking for someone to blame.