Who was Mikayla Raines? YouTuber dies by suicide following online harassment
Mikayla Raines, a YouTuber as well as the founder of SaveAFox Rescue, has died by suicide. For those unaware, Mikayla Raines was a 31-year-old wildlife rescuer from Minnesota who founded the fox sanctuary called SaveAFox Rescue. She had a popular YouTube channel with the same name as her organization, which currently boasts over 2.43 million subscribers.
“Mikayla Raines passed away. This is the most hurtful and difficult time of my life, so please bear with me as I try to read this through the tears. Mikayla was the most bright and shining example of what you could accomplish if you really set your mind to something. She was never held back by ideas that everyone else considered unrealistic. As many of you know, she was on the autism spectrum, and while that made her life very difficult, it allowed her to hyper-focus on one thing, and that one thing was, obviously, animals.”
“Now, I want to talk about how words whether spoken in person or written online can affect someone. For a few years, a group of people had been throwing dirt on Mikayla’s name and the rescue. Most of these are people she knew, and some of them are other animal sanctuaries. They consistently spread ridiculous claims and rumors, and being a sensitive human that she was, Mikayla took it all to heart, and it hurt her. It hurt her a lot. But she pushed through. For years, she pushed through the pain of people trying to bring her down, and the mental challenges she faced, and she still rescued hundreds of animals and changed the lives of so many.” Timestamp – 06:51.
