Did tabloid news outlet TMZ publish a report saying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy bought a Los Angeles mansion belonging to Sean "Diddy" Combs for $61 Million? No, that's not true: Using TMZ's search box, Lead Stories found no such story about Diddy. Searching for Zelenskyy's name similarly showed no such TMZ story. The claim appeared in a Feb. 18, 2026…
Did Rep. Ted Lieu say that the full, unreleased Epstein files show Donald Trump raping children? No, that's not true: Lieu said at a February 3, 2026, news conference that the files include "highly disturbing allegations" of Donald Trump raping and threatening to kill children. He did not reference "unreleased" files, or say that child rapes are seen in them.…
Does a video from the White House show a woman acting strangely? No, that's not true: The grainy images are from a slow-motion version of a video taken at a White House news conference in December 2025 announcing that Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies, and his wife, Susan, would donate more than $6 billion to soon-to-be-opened Trump Accounts,…
Does an image show Attorney General Pam Bondi at age 14 with President Donald Trump at a Jeffrey Epstein party? No, that's not true: An AI-generated content detector concluded that it was 99.9% certain to have been made by an artificial intelligence tool. Lead Stories found obvious signs that it was a deepfake image in 2023 when we fact checked…
Did CNN report that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who "un-alived" Minnesota nurse Alex Pretti and claimed "self-defense" was found "not-guilty"? No, that's not true: A search across the network's website did not show any CNN story saying that happened. Talking to Lead Stories, CNN's spokesperson said that the claim is false. As of this writing, none of the…
Is a DJ Vlad 'confession' that Roc Nation bribed the judge, jury, witnesses, and police to convict Tory Lanez for shooting Megan Thee Stallion real? No, that's not true: While it was posted by DJ Vlad's X account, it concluded with a sentence calling the claims "these lies." DJ Vlad, a hip hop producer turned journalist, posted replies on this…
Did various celebrities, including Adam Sandler, Jeanine Pirro and Vince Gill unveil or introduce a "new bill" that would block George Soros from bankrolling protests by classifying such funding as "organized crime under the RICO Act"? No, that's not true: Nearly identical stories mentioning those and other names were published by a network of foreign websites and Facebook pages. There…
Was President Trump originally mentioned in the claim that 4,725 wire transfers totalling $1.1 billion were made to Jeffrey Epstein using Russian banks? No, that's not true: This appears to be based on a mangled version of a statement made by Senator Ron Wyden about various transfers flowing in and out of Epstein's account. The Congressional Record shows that when…
Does a real photo show Donald Trump Jr. at a shooting bench with the scope of his rifle mounted backwards? No, that's not true: This image has been digitally edited. An earlier copy of the image appears in a 2024 article with the scope mounted properly. The altered image appears in a post (archived here) published on Bluesky by @mrsbettybowers…
Did Kristi Noem say "If Jesus wanted America to speak Spanish and have the Super Bowl half time show in a foreign language, he would not have written the Bible in English."? No, that's not true: Noem did not say this. This fake quote came from a meme shared by a satire page that included a small watermark with the…
Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
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