Rebecca Black claims she was ‘scammed’ into endorsing Mexico’s former president when she was 14

Black rose to prominence at age 13 when her single ‘Friday’ became a viral YouTube hit

Rebecca Black has recalled the shocking moment she claims she and her family were “scammed” into endorsing Mexico’s former president when she was 14 years old.

At the time, the now 25-year-old singer who rose to prominence in 2011 with her viral hit song “Friday”, was slammed for her seeming support of 2012’s Mexican presidential frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto.

Nieto would go on to win the election, serving as the country’s 64th president from December 2012 to November 2018.

In a video posted on Sunday (25 September), the singer used the TikTok storytime trend to set the record straight with her side of past events.

Black began by recounting the moment her mother – a Mexican emigrant – was contacted by a “distant family relative”, who convinced her there was a “Rebecca Black fan club” in a small Mexican town who wanted to give Black “the keys to the city”.

“Next thing I know, we’re on our way to Mexico,” Black continued. “We end up in this small town, and we get to the day of the meet-and-greet.”

“They took us to this fancy house, and then ushered us into a room full of men in suits,” she remembered, before explaining that they then took her to a separate room with about 20 people in it, which she said looked like a “press conference”.

Black was seated next to her mother, who she said acted as her translator, when people from the crowd started asking questions about how she liked Mexico, how she felt about voting rights, and how she felt about the presidential candidate at the time.

“And I’m like, who? What?” Black said. “I don’t really know what’s going on, but I also don’t want to look stupid again in front of the world. So I’m like, ‘Yeah, great, he’s great, voting’s great, I’m sure it’ll all be great’ not really knowing what I’m talking about.”

Ahead of her flight home, while scrolling through Twitter, she recalled “seeing headlines about me and how I have endorsed the presidential candidate of Mexico, at the time. And then I realise that my entire family was just scammed by this distant relative who worked for his presidential campaign”.

While in office, Nieto was accused of plagiarising his law thesis and criticised for his leadership.

In August of this year, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office opened several lines of investigation against the former president, several weeks after the country’s anti-money laundering agency accused the former leader of handling millions of dollars in possibly illegal funds.