Does a viral video authentically capture a heated phone exchange between the mother of a 14-year-old transgender girl and her child's teacher who insists on using an incorrect pronoun to address the student? No, that's not true: The woman in the video is a professional actress. An earlier version of the same footage contained a disclaimer saying it is "a reenacted scene."
The story resurfaced in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 1, 2024. The text overlay said:
This mother went viral after angrily calling her child's teacher for 'misgendering' her kid.
Teacher: 'I want everybody to start calling me a helicopter'.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed October 2 13:35:08 2024 UTC)
The two-minute video purported to portray an authentic angry exchange between a British-sounding parent and a teacher, "Mr. Riley," about misgendering a person named "Ellie Jones" -- a 14-year-old teenager who was said to have recently transitioned.
The earliest version of the video published on Facebook on April 18, 2024, (archived here) was one minute longer. In it, the parent introduced herself as "Sian Jones":
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Oct 2 16:51:42 2024 UTC)
However, the woman featured in the video is Sara Mazzanti -- an actress (archived here) whose reels (archived here and here) can be found on several websites (archived here and here).
Amazon Rekognition confirmed that the reel and the footage on social media showed the same person.
At the 2:57 mark -- seconds before the longer version of the video ends on Facebook -- two people, including Mazzanti, appear on the screen, spelling out that the previous footage was "a reenactment scene" and that the two people in it were actors:
(Sources: Facebook screenshots taken on Wed Oct 2 between 15:10:00 and 15:15:15 2024 UTC; composite image by Lead Stories)
Lead Stories contacted Mazzanti for additional comments but didn't receive an immediate response.
The April 18, 2024, version of the video was published on Facebook by an account (archived here) affiliated with Komi Group (archived here), a U.K.-based company whose self-description (archived here) says it has been "growing media brands since 2016."
It's Gone Viral -- a network of accounts on various social media platforms of the same name -- is one of the company's brands (archived here).
It's unclear whether the video that is the focus of this fact check was produced by Komi Group or republished from somewhere else. In the past, the group was reported to have produced video content.
On April 29, 2024, the clip was republished by a Dutch-language website (archived here) and was featured around the 29:00 mark on a Townhall.com video blog (archived here and here) hosted by Larry O'Connor. Both resources discussed the footage as if it portrayed a real-life scene.
In June 2024, the clip resurfaced on TikTok (archived here).
On September 20, 2024, it was republished by the It's Gone Viral account (archived here and here) on TikTok. This time, there was no disclaimer. On September 26, 2024, it reappeared on X here (archived here), here (archived here) and here (archived here). None of those posts indicated that the footage showed an actress.
Lead Stories contacted Komi Group but didn't receive an immediate response.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims mentioning transgender people can be found here. Stories about the U.K. are here.
