A Carnegie Mellon University professor, who in 2022 sparked a furor with her social media post wishing a dying Queen Elizabeth II “excruciating” pain, offered this take on Saturday’s attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life:

“It was staged,” Uju Anya posted to the social media platform X.

Anya, an associate professor of second language acquisition, posted the comment a couple of hours after Trump suffered a wound to his right ear in the shooting at the Butler rally. She offered the claim without specific substantiation.

Rally attendee Corey Comperatore, 50, the former chief of the Buffalo Township fire department, died in the shooting. Two other bystanders were critically wounded.

“It was staged. Like a stupid Tubi movie set in the Bronx with palm trees in the background,” Anya wrote in one post to X, formerly known as Twitter.

“And people died behind this farce. Actual people’s lives gone for them to stage this stupid show,” she said in another post.

“They lie, and people die. That’s exactly what they do. That’s the record,” she wrote. “Whatever ‘attack’ on him they set up to stoke his followers’ fears and sentiments threat and persecution has now cost lives.”

Another platform user asked her, “With two people dead? Come on now.”

Replied Anya, “People dying doesn’t make the attack any less staged.”

The professor did not immediately respond to an email from TribLive on Wednesday seeking comment and elaboration on her claim. A post pinned to her X account said she is “on a Mellon grant-funded voyage in Brazil and Colombia conducting research site exploration visits for my AfroMetaverse project.”

The posts on X remained up as of Wednesday afternoon.

A spokesman for Carnegie Mellon, Peter Kerwin, did not offer a reaction to Anya’s post or say whether it squares with the university’s social media policies. Instead, he referred a reporter to a general statement issued Sunday by Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian, who called the events “an assault on our democratic values.”

Amid the pandemonium Saturday, Secret Service sharpshooters shot and killed the assailant, Thomas Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, seconds after he squeezed off multiple gunshots using an AR-style rifle atop an unprotected rooftop 150 yards or so from the event stage. Trump had just begun his remarks before thousands at the Butler Farm Show grounds.

Whisked from the stage by heavily armed federal agents, he was transported to Butler Memorial Hospital and checked out by staff. He has since traveled to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.

The horrific attack drew worldwide condemnation. It also fueled wide-ranging theories on social media, from suggestions that the shooting was the work of Democrats and that Crooks was allowed to take up a rooftop position unchallenged, to assertions that the whole thing was a fake.

An author and researcher, Anya is part of the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics in Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She became a tenured professor at CMU in February.

On her faculty page, Anya describes herself as a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism.

“My primary fields of inquiry are critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students,” she wrote.

In September 2022, as the British royal family prepared to announce Queen Elizabeth’s passing, Anya made her feelings known on X.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” the initial tweet read. “May her pain be excruciating.”

Those words drew fierce condemnation in the U.S. and abroad, but also support including thousands of petition signatures calling her an accomplished scholar and a force for diversity, equity and inclusion. To them, she was exercising her free speech rights.

In a letter, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, headquartered in Philadelphia, implored Jahanian not to punish her.

Anya’s words apparently were rooted in feelings experienced in parts of the globe about the British empire and its colonization during the 1950s as the queen ascended to the throne. Though revered in parts of the world, she was the subject of bitterness in parts of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, The Associated Press reported at the time.

Anya, of Nigerian-Trinidadian descent, defended her views, noting that the colonialism of past decades deeply affected her family.

“If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” she wrote.

At the time, Carnegie Mellon called Anya’s sentiment “offensive and objectionable” but noted it had been posted to her personal social media account and “free expression is core to the mission of higher education.”

“However,” added Kerwin, “the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”

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