In a now-deleted Instagram video, ‘Zoey 101’ actress Jamie Lynn Spears called on Elon Musk to “fix” his Teslas, which she indirectly blamed for causing the deaths of multiple cats in her family, including her daughter’s pet, named Turkey.
"We have now lost — I don’t even want to tell you how many cats. It’s really devastating and tragic for everyone involved,” the mother of two said in a clip widely shared by the media.
“I know that there’s just bigger things to worry about in the world right now, but somebody’s gotta let Elon Musk know that the Tesla is a secret cat killer and it’s a problem that we’ve really got to fix,” Spears announced.
One of her suggestions was to introduce ringing noises to the “quiet” Tesla that would “bother cat or animal ears when it cranks up” to save the poor fellas from immanent death. Apparently, the electric vehicle's lack of a pleasantly purring, run-of-the-mill internal combustion engine was to blame rather than its self-driving software.
The actress went on to admit that there was some “user error involved” but still called on the Tesla CEO to pay her a “cats” debt by solving the issue.
“Elon Musk, let's figure this out. I mean, you owe me a couple cats,” Britney Spears’ sister concluded.
But her comments caused a storm on social media, with users moving to share their outrage with the “serial cat killer” actress, rather than the car's manufacturer.
“Can we please talk about how jamie lynn spears has ran over not one but multiple of her cats and she's blaming tesla for their cars being too quiet ...,” one person wrote.
“I’m sorry but nothing will distract me today from the fact that Jamie Lynn Spears thinks it’s Tesla’s fault that she’s a serial cat killer,” another user raged.
The clip provoked a real meme contest on Twitter.
Following the backlash, the 29-year-old actress returned to Instagram to backtrack on her initial statements, which she said the media found “misleading”: now the teen series star claimed on her Instagram stories that she “did not run over any cats” and that Tesla was “not to be blamed, and was never intended to be” for the tragic incidents.
“User error is admittedly involved,” Jamie Lynn wrote.
She insisted that her family “always” checks for animals before moving their cars.
“I was only making a suggesting about something I think would be extremely helpful,” she said, adding that “the geniuses” at Tesla would work to solve the issue.
And many would hope so, for the sake of the poor cats.
Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s younger sibling, played a starring role in a widely popular Nickelodeon sitcom, ‘Zoey 101’, which ran from 2005 to 2008. In the final season of the teen series, the actress got pregnant with her first daughter Maddie Briann Aldridge, fathered by her then-boyfriend Casey Aldrige.