Did Melania Trump officially e-file for divorce from Donald Trump over Labor Day weekend 2024? No, that's not true: This story originated with a faked screenshot that looked like Newsweek reporting. The image resembling a Newsweek tweet was posted to several social media platforms by data scientist and whistleblower Rebekah Jones, who later claimed this was a test. After the post spread on social media on September 1, 2024, Jones posted a seven-minute-long video on TikTok where she stated, "I posted something that is absolutely and completely fabricated and made up."
The false claim took on a life of its own in a post (archived here) published by @bluelionpolitix on September 1, 2024. The post was captioned:
🚨 BREAKING: TROUBLE IN PARADISE!
Melania Trump has officially filed for divorce - more details to come.
This is how the post appeared on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Sep 02 17:53:11 2024 UTC)
This post features a photo of Melania and Donald Trump that has a stylized "tear" down the middle of the image between them. The @bluelionpolitix post contains no mention of the original post by Rebekah Jones, did not feature the screenshot of the nonexistent Newsweek article Jones fabricated and offers no supporting information to back up the baseless claim. At the time of writing Jones has made her account on X private.
The screenshot (pictured below) by Jones, with a red "FALSE" tag added, was shared in a fact checking post (archived here) on X by BBC journalist and disinformation expert Shayan Sardarizadeh. He wrote:
Melania Trump hasn't filed for divorce.
This is a fake, digitally-altered screenshot of a Newsweek tweet. You can see the genuine one from December 2019 on the right.
His debunking post also contained a screenshot of a real December 5, 2019, Newsweek post featuring the same photo of Melania Trump. That 2019 Newsweek post was not about divorce -- it was captioned:
Melania says children should be kept out of politics, Twitter reminds her of all the kids her husband caged
The caption Jones posted with the fake screenshot read:
Melania Trump e-files for divorce as Trump campaign tanks, sentencing looms
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Sep 02 18:46:46 2024 UTC)
Jones, who became famous as a whistleblower in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, posted a 7:10-minute-long video on TikTok (archived here) on September 1, 2024, explaining that she fabricated this news item and her rationale for doing it. The post has a text overlay across the top (pictured below) that says, "the experiment." The post's caption contains these hashtags:
#experiment #melania #trump #politics #divorce #maga #fyp #fypage #breaking #republican #disinformation
Jones begins by saying:
So I posted something that is absolutely completely fabricated and made up tonight to kind of measure the different systems on social media and how they deal with misinformation. Obviously the disinformation went the furthest the fastest on Twitter, which should not surprise anybody, because that is essentially what this site is built for at this point. And we're downloading the metrics to see how the tweet performs, how many people see it, how many people share it. And for all the shit that TikTok gets, it throttled it almost immediately.
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Sep 02 19:03:21 2024 UTC)
Jones followed this video on TikTok with another an hour later, where she discussed how "seemingly legitimate fake news websites driven by AI aggregating data from online have reported this information as fact." In this video she included a screenshot of an article posted on countylocalnews.com.
Lead Stories searched the website and found that four articles had been published since September 1, 2024. The first article reported the fabricated story as timestamped news (archived here), the second article added that this had not been officially confirmed (archived here), and the last two articles, published on September 2, 2024, were presented as a fact check (archived here) and a warning to verify (archived here) before sharing.
Several outlets have reviewed this specific claim originating from the post by Jones, including comingsoon.net and International Business Times.
Trump divorce rumors have circulated in the past; several fact checks about this by Lead Stories can be found here.
