Fake News: NO Former Clinton Aide Indicted For Child Sex Trafficking

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: NO Former Clinton Aide Indicted For Child Sex Trafficking

Was Clare Bronfman, the heiress to the Seagram fortune who was indicted in the case surrounding the NXIVM sex cult, a former Clinton aide? No, that's not true: she was just one of many donors to Hillary Clinton's campaign but she played no direct role in it. She was certainly not one of "her closest aides". That story was made up by a site that loves to take real news articles and then adds some invented facts to the headline and first paragraphs of their own version to make it more attractive to the people it tricks into believing they are reading a real news website so they can make money from advertising.

The story originated from an article published by YourNewsWire on June 26, 2018 titled "Former Clinton Aide Indicted For Child Sex Trafficking" (archived here) which opened:

One of Hillary Clinton's closest aides has been indicted on child trafficking charges as part of an investigation into an elite Hollywood pedophile ring.

Clare Bronfman, the heiress to Seagrams fortune, is set to face prosecutors in July as part of the NXIVM child sex cult case.

Bronfman invested $150 million of her fortune into NXIVM and officially donated at least $30,000 to the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign. In addition, Bronfman gave large chunks of her remaining "hundreds of millions" into helping promote Hillary Clinton's agenda.

As usual the mentions in the YourNewsWire article about child sex trafficking and a Hollywood pedophile ring are completely unsupported by evidence. No actual underage victims of Clare Bronfman have been reported anywhere in the media or in court documents. If you do find any, please let us know via our contact form and we will update this article.

YourNewsWire has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page "The People's Voice" recently lost its verification checkmark according to a report from MMFA.

The Terms of Use of the site also make it clear they don't really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:

THE PEOPLE'S VOICE, INC. AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.

The site was profiled in the Hollywood reporter where it was described as:

Your News Wire, a 3-year-old website of murky facts and slippery spin, is published by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway -- a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 -- out of an apartment in L.A.'s historic El Royale.

RationalWiki described it as:

YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com[1]) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto ("News. Truth. Unfiltered").[1]

A while ago we also reported that YourNewsWire had rebranded itself as NewsPunch by changing its domain name in an apparent effort to evade filtering/blocking. It appears the site has changed back to it's old name in the mean time but you can still see the NewsPunch name in the contact email address in the footer.

We wrote about yournewswire.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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