Does a video show former One Direction singer Liam Payne falling to his death in Argentina? No, that's not true: The video is of another person escaping a fire. It was taken in Mexico in 2023, before Payne's death.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on October 17, 2024. The post, which included a series of images and a video, was captioned:
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This fact check only concerns the video of a person falling from a building included in the post.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of this fact check:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Oct 17 16:02:49 2024 UTC)
The video was taken in 2023
Lead Stories used Google and Bing to reverse image search a still from the video. Those results led us to articles published in 2023 (here, here and here) stating that the video showed a man escaping a building fire in Mexico City on September 13, 2023. Additionally, the video was posted on X on September 13, 2023, by Telediario host Yuliana Escobedo. The caption of the post (translated from Spanish to English by Google) read:
This morning a fire broke out in an apartment on República de Cuba Street, in the Historic Center of Mexico City; a young man fell from the third floor trying to escape the flames.
Liam Payne's death
Payne, a former member of the musical group One Direction, died on October 16, 2024, after falling from a third-floor balcony at a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Lead Stories fact check
Lead Stories previously debunked a claim related to another former One Direction member, Louis Tomlinson, when he was in Buenos Aires. That fact check can be found here.
