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In June 2021, news outlets across the world reported that a woman in South Africa had given birth to 10 babies at once. BBC News, the New York Post and Newsweek, among others, all published stories which were careful to cite the original source of the story — Pretoria News, a newspaper based in the major South African city of Pretoria, in the province of Gauteng. On June 8, Pretoria News broke the story, reporting that: On June 9, Sithole and Tsotetsi, in collaboration with Pretoria News, appealed to the public for donations and financial assistance in meeting the significant burden of looking after 10 newborn babies. In the weeks after Pretoria News first broke the story, it slowly fell apart. Snopes made repeated inquiries to relevant parties over that time, and on June 23, the government of the province of Gauteng, in which the births purportedly took place, stated definitively that their own investigation had concluded Sithole did not give birth at all, in June 2021, and in fact was not even pregnant. We are therefore changing our rating to False. Here's how the yarn unravelled. No photographs of the babies, or other concrete evidence, were made public, from the time the story was first broken. On June 9, Tsotetsi addressed skepticism about the story in an interview with Pretoria News:
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