Fact Check: Daily Mail Did NOT Report Sen. Lindsey Graham Is Pedophile Who Breached Parole Weeks After Release From Jail

Fact Check

  • by: Dean Miller
Fact Check: Daily Mail Did NOT Report Sen. Lindsey Graham Is Pedophile Who Breached Parole Weeks After Release From Jail Photo Swap

Did The Daily Mail report that Sen. Lindsey Graham is a pedophile who "plied boys with drugs and sexually assaulted them" and breached parole after his release from jail? No, that's not true: An account on X plastered a photo of Graham onto an authentic Mail article about an Australian politician to make it look like Graham was the subject of the story. The account @DecentraliseP describes itself as a source of "mockery, memes & satire."

The post about Graham originated in a November 22, 2024, post on X (archived here) under the title "It's over for Lindsey Graham." The screenshot above two photos of Graham read:

Paedophile politician, 62, who plied boys with drugs and sexually assaulted them is accused of breaching parole just four weeks after walking free from jail

This is how the X post appeared at the time this was written:

Graham.png

(Source: X.com screenshot taken on Wed Nov 27 22:15:00 2024 UTC)

The original article was about Milton Orkopoulos of New South Wales, a previous Australian labor minister convicted of child sex abuse. It appeared January 20, 2020, (archived here) and included a photo of Orkopoulos:

Orkopoulos.jpg

(Source: MailOnline.com screenshot taken on Wed Nov 27 22:31:00 2024 UTC)

Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Sen. Lindsey Graham can be found here and fact checks of claims about the Daily Mail here.

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  Dean Miller

Lead Stories Managing Editor Dean Miller has edited daily and weekly newspapers, worked as a reporter for more than a decade and is co-author of two non-fiction books. After a Harvard Nieman Fellowship, he served as Director of Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy for six years, then as Senior Vice President/Content at Connecticut Public Broadcasting. Most recently, he wrote the twice-weekly "Save the Free Press" column for The Seattle Times. 

Read more about or contact Dean Miller

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