A former student at the University of Kentucky pleaded guilty to a racist attack against a Black student. Sophia Rosing appeared in court on Aug. 12. The 23-year-old pleaded guilty to four counts of fourth-degree assault, as well as one count of disorderly conduct and another count of public intoxication, according to her attorney Fred Peters. Rosing is facing up to 12 months in jail, 100 hours of community service and a $25 fine.
“A lot of things got said, apologies were made and we worked it out,” Peters said during the mediation, according to The Lexington Herald Leader. “Her life has been on hold for the past 18 to 20 months. She has had a lot of time to think about what she has done, and she wrote a nice letter of apology.”
Rosing is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 17, CBS News reported.
In November 2022, she physically assaulted and hurled racial slurs at Kylah Spring, a Black student who was working at the front desk of Boyd Hall. The incident was recorded on video and went viral on social media. Spring said in the video that Rosing hit her multiple times and kicked her in the stomach, according to CBS News.
In just 10 minutes, Rosing used the N-word over 200 times. She also resisted arrest and bit a police officer sent to the scene, according to the arrest report. She was “charged with first and second offenses of public intoxication, third-degree assault of a police officer, fourth-degree assault and second-degree disorderly conduct,” according to The Lexington Herald Leader.
The following night, Rosing posted a $10,000 bond and was released from detention. After being indicted by a grand jury in February 2023, she entered a not-guilty plea.
The University of Kentucky banned Rosing from its campus, forcing her to withdraw enrollment. She was even terminated from her job at Dillard’s and lost a social media influencing deal with CollegeFashionista, the Lexington Herald Leader reported.
Spring does not believe Rosing has remorse concerning the incident.
“I feel that a person that is remorseful takes actions that are moving towards proving they are remorseful,” she told WLEX. “Not just words.”
In an interview with CBS Mornings in 2022, she said, “It’s changed my outlook on how often that situations like this happen. Obviously I’ve seen things like this in the news, but you never really know how common of an occurrence it is until it happens to you. It was a little bit of an eye-opening moment for me to wake up and realize what’s happening in our country to young children of color, to people of color.”
At the time, hundreds of students marched on campus in support of Spring and called for the University of Kentucky to take action. Spring noted that she tried to stay calm to avoid any potential repercussions against her.
“I wanted to make sure I acted appropriately so that I could keep my job because the script could have been flipped at any time if I had retaliated,” she said, according to CBS News.
University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto said in a statement published after the incident that Spring “acted with professionalism, restraint and discretion.”
