Fake News: British Man Did NOT Sleep With Hundreds of Girls by Passing Himself off as Prince Harry

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Fake News: British Man Did NOT Sleep With Hundreds of Girls by Passing Himself off as Prince Harry

Did 34-year-old Henry Hampshire from Dorset claim he bedded hundreds of credulous girls by pretending to be Prince Harry? No, that's not true: the story was made up by a Canadian entertainment website that makes a living by publishing fictional stories often involving weird crimes, bizarre sex acts or strange accidents. It is not real news.

The story originated from an article published on February 22, 2019 titled "British man slept with hundreds of credulous girls while passing himself off as Prince Harry" (archived here) which opened:

A British man claims he has slept with over six hundred women after passing himself off as the real Prince Harry of the British royal family.

In an interview with the Dorset Herald this week, Henry Hampshire, 34, admitted using his stunning resemblance to the Duke of Sussex to sexually gratify himself and dupe credulous women into having sex with him.

Surprisingly enough, Hampshire claims he has had even more success with the ladies since Prince Harry has announced his engagement to American actress Meghan Markle and that they are expecting their first child.

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:

British man slept with hundreds of credulous girls while passing himself off as Prince Harry

A British man claims he has slept with over six hundred women after passing himself off as the real Prince Harry of the British royal family. In an interview with the Dorset Herald this week, Henry Hampshire, 34, admitted using his stunning resemblance to the Duke of Sussex to sexually gratify hims

But there is no news source named the "Dorset Herald" and the man on the left in the picture appears to be a Jonathan McMillan from Coventry according to this photo gallery (archived here):

Jonathan McMillan - A fat man who cannot tan. Gingerbeard or die!

Jonathan McMillan is an Actor, Extra and Drummer based in Coventry, United Kingdom.

The picture on the right also seems to be him, the image was probably taken from his bandcamp page:

Jonathan McMillan's collection | Bandcamp

London, UK * Folk * 6 collection items

The website World News Daily Report is a website specialized in posting hoaxes and made up stories. The disclaimer on their website is pretty clear about that even though you have to scroll all the way down the page to find it:

World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.

On March 20, 2019 the site added a new header that included the slogan "Where facts don't matter" to make it clearer to casual visitors the published content is fictional:

factsdontmatter3.png

It is run by Janick Murray-Hall and Olivier Legault, who also run the satirical Journal de Mourréal, a satirical site spoofing the (real) Journal de Montéal. Very often their stories feature an image showing a random crazy mugshot found in a mugshot gallery on the internet or on a stock photo website superimposed over a background of flashing police lights or crime scene tape.

Articles from the site are frequently copied (sometimes even months or years later) by varous fake news websites that omit the satire disclaimer and present the information as real.

NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalist to rank the reliability of websites, describes worldnewsdailyreport.com as:

A website that publishes hoaxes and made-up stories that are often widely shared and mistaken for news.

According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.

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

Updates:

  • 2019-03-21T01:48:29Z 2019-03-21T01:48:29Z
    Story updated with info about new site header.

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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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