Fact Check: John Travolta Was NOT Found Dead From Apparent Suicide After His Wife's Death

Fact Check

  • by: Sarah Thompson
Fact Check: John Travolta Was NOT Found Dead From Apparent Suicide After His Wife's Death Death Hoax

Was John Travolta found dead from apparent suicide after his wife's death? No, that's not true: This death hoax is one of many produced by a complex scheme coming from the Philippines that drives web traffic by tricking people into sharing a link to the scam in order to continue watching a video.The false story originated shortly after the public learned of the death of John Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, but John Travolta did not kill himself.

Misleading Facebook posts popped up that go to an article (archived here) published by VIRALVIDSTODAY.BLOGSPOT.COM on July 14, 2020, under the title "After His Wife's Death, JOHN TRAVOLTA Found Dead Inside Their Room From Apparent Suicide." One post was put in the California Small Business Owner Group by a profile, Jonna Ogabar. Her post was captioned:

After His Wife's Death, JOHN TRAVOLTA Found Dead Inside Their Room From Apparent Suicide It has been confirmed that John Travolta has passed away. Our hearts go out to her friends and family. Watch the Video in my Timeline.

Phoaxer05.JPG

With reverse image search, the grim and blurry photo of the room used to illustrate that post was found to have originated in a 2017 blog post from news website in the Philippines, rmn.ph titled, "Crime scene sa gipatay nga babayeng Radio Dj" (here)(archived here)
PhoaxerRMN.JPG

Following back to the timeline of Jonna Ogabar the #RestInPeace post has the link to the blog, VIRALVIDSTODAY.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Phoaxer06.JPG

Clicking the link to VIRALVIDSTODAY.BLOGSPOT.COM only affords a brief glimpse of the blog page before redirecting to a fake video.

Phoaxer08BLOG.jpg

The video at randomnames.club shows a still photo which appears to have been taken from the newspaper The Sun. The fake video also has the heading "World Breaking News," and a fake view counter.

phoaxer15SUN.JPGWhile The Sun has many articles about John Travolta and his family, none feature this image and false headline. On July 13, 2020, The Sun published, "'BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL AND BRAVE' John Travolta's new agony as wife Kelly Preston dies after secret two-year breast cancer battle" (here)(archived here). The Sun has a dedicated page about John Travolta (here)(archived July 14, 2020, here) that does include a wedding photo which also is the next image in the fake randomnames.club video. After taking some seconds to "load" the fake video, the wedding picture comes up and the video freezes with a text overlay.

Phoaxer04.JPGThe overlay reads:

Warning: Graphic Content (18+)
Share to Continue Watching this Video

If the viewer is tricked into sharing the hoax link on their timeline, at this point they are stuck in an endless loop and will never see the "Graphic Content" video that is promised. The "video" will reset back to the beginning. After "loading" for a while it reverts to "The Sun" opening image and then the wedding picture with the "Graphic Content" warning where the cycle begins again.

Lead Stories wrote about this death hoax scam recently: Fact Check: CNN Did NOT Report Will Smith Death Hoax

Previously, the same network of sites has created another death hoax about Will Smith and his son, as well as false reports about Duane Chapman, Clint Eastwood, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Tom Cruise and Rowan "Mr. Bean" Atkinson.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Sarah Thompson

Sarah Thompson lives with her family and pets on a small farm in Indiana. She founded a Facebook page and a blog called “Exploiting the Niche” in 2017 to help others learn about manipulative tactics and avoid scams on social media. Since then she has collaborated with journalists in the USA, Canada and Australia and since December 2019 she works as a Social Media Authenticity Analyst at Lead Stories.


 

Read more about or contact Sarah Thompson

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