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  • 2018-02-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Black Lives Matter Leader Get Sued for Embezzling Donations? (en)
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  • Two of the favorite targets of disreputable, right-wing web sites are the Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstream liberal news media. In February 2018, the MediaConservative.com web site republished a fabricated story that ticked both those boxes. The story attacked a purportedly prominent member of Black Lives Matter named Marquesha Johnson, accusing her of organizing over 900 events and gather[ing] millions of dollars in donations to escape homelessness and purchase a million-dollar home with donations solicited to help the social justice movement. MediaConservative wrote: The post rehashes a story originally published in November 2017 by the satirical web site ReaganWasRight.com, which falsely reported: We found no evidence that corroborates any of these claims, which were also circulated on the ConservativeStand.com web site. The ReaganWasRight.com article linked to a federal court records database, but there is no record there of any lawsuit against a Marquesha Johnson. In fact, we could find no evidence of a leading Black Lives Matter campaigner of that name. The image used in all three articles does not show Marquesha Johnson and her $1.2 million home. In fact, it is a composite of a police photograph of Temitope Adebamiro, a Delaware woman sentenced to four years in prison in 2016 for stabbing her husband to death, and a photograph of Las Ventanas Al Paraiso, a resort in Los Cabos, Mexico, owned by the billionaire Ty Warner. In other words, the story and the accompanying photo are both outright fabrications. ConservativeStand.com publishes sensationalist right-wing content, and has a disclaimer stating the authors don't guarantee the accuracy of what they publish: ReaganWasRight.com, the original source of the fabricated Marquesha Johnson story, is run by Christopher Blair, a well-known purveyor of fake news and so-called satire who is also behind the web sites Last Line of Defense, Freedum Junkshun and As American As Apple Pie. In a disclaimer on ReaganWasRight.com, Blair makes it clear that nothing published on the web site is to be taken as accurate: Despite claims of satire from these sites, it's not at all clear what this particular article is satirizing, or where the humor is in a false story about a black woman activist stealing millions of dollars which had been donated in good faith to a prominent social justice movement. The article simply plays into common negative, false portrayals of the Black Lives Matter movement as betraying African-Americans. (en)
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