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  • 2022-07-26 (xsd:date)
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  • No evidence Mel Gibson claimed Hollywood elites drink ‘baby blood’ (en)
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  • Mel Gibson said Hollywood studios are drenched in the blood of innocent children and that the consumption of baby blood is so popular in Hollywood that it basically operates as a currency of its own. There’s no evidence that Mr Gibson ever made these comments. Similar comments which have previously circulated on social media have been denied by his representatives. A Facebook post has shared comments falsely attributed to Mel Gibson, claiming the actor exposes Hollywood as the Hub of Satanic Child Sacrifice. The post states: Hollywood studios are ‘drenched in the blood of innocent children’ according to Mel Gibson who says the consumption of ‘baby blood is so popular in Hollywood that it basically operates as a currency of its own.’ Full Fact has contacted Mr Gibson’s representatives for comment, but we have found no evidence that the actor ever made these comments in public, or that he has made claims regarding the consumption of baby blood in Hollywood. These quotes are similar to others which have circulated on social media in recent years, several of which have been debunked by other fact-checking organisations. In 2020, Reuters reported that a number of Facebook posts claiming Mr Gibson said that Hollywood is a den of parasites who feast on the blood of children and that every studio in Hollywood is bought and paid for with the blood of innocent children appeared to be based on a since-deleted article published on the website Your News Wire, which has since changed its name to NewsPunch.com. The co-founder of NewsPunch, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, has since disavowed the article, telling AFP Fact Check in 2020: When we moved domains to NewsPunch.com in 2019, stories like this no longer adhered to our new editorial standards. Specifically there was no proof that Mel Gibson said any of the statements quoted in the original article. Because of this, we decided to unpublish the story, as the claims being made in it could not be adequately fact-checked by us. The quotes featured in the most recent Facebook post are not identical to those seen in previous posts, however the theme and some of the wording is broadly similar. Representatives for the actor have previously denied that he had said any of the quotes about the blood of innocent children attributed to him, with a spokesperson telling Reuters in 2020 that the claims were 100% fake. According to Wired, a conspiracy theory claiming Hollywood celebrities are involved in child-trafficking and blood harvesting has existed in various forms for a number of years. The magazine claimed in a 2020 article that the recent surge in interest can be traced to March 2020 and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the growth of the QAnon conspiracy movement, which we have previously written about. Among other things, many QAnon followers believe certain Democratic politicians, celebrities and prominent business figures are involved in a vast Satan-worshipping paedophile ring. Image courtesy of Georges Biard This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence that Mr Gibson ever made these comments. Similar comments which have previously circulated on social media have been denied by his representatives. (en)
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