Did late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel say he was ending his show on January 20, 2025, and moving to Canada? No, that's not true: This comes from a website that labels itself satire. An online search turned up no evidence that Kimmel had ever said such a thing.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on November 10, 2024. The caption read:
Jimmy Kimmel Show to End January 20th: 'I'm Leaving for Canada and Never Coming Back' - SATIRE
This how the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Nov 25 15:42:51 2024 UTC)
The claim that Kimmel will pull the plug on his comedy show and make tracks for Canada on January 20, 2025 -- the day Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated as president -- has no basis in reality.
The first comment on the Facebook post included a link to the original article about Kimmel's supposed moving plans (archived here), published by a website called Esspots on November 10, 2024. The two topic tags below the headline both read "SATIRE." This is what the headline and tags, highlighted in red by Lead Stories, looked like:
(Source: Esspots screenshot taken on Mon Nov 25 16:20:48 2024 UTC)
On its "About Us" page (archived here), Esspots explicitly tells readers not to take its stories seriously:
Welcome to the US page of Esspots (A Subsidiary of SpaceXMania.com specializing in Satire and Parody News), your one-stop destination for satirical news and commentary about the United States of America. Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire.
Still, Esspots' claim about Kimmel resurfaced on other social media accounts and websites that did not note the satire disclaimer -- for example, here (archived here), here (archived here) and here (archived here).
Lead Stories ran the Esspots piece through Hive Moderation, an online artificial intelligence detection tool, which found it was 99.9 percent "likely to contain AI Generated Text."
(Source: Hive Moderation screenshot taken on Mon Nov 25 16:57:04 2024 UTC)
In 2022, Kimmel signed a three-year contract extension that foresees him staying on the air until at least 2026, according to the Associated Press (archived here). Lead Stories did a keyword search on Google on November 25, 2024, and found no evidence that any of this had changed (archived here). The search turned up only rehashes of Esspots' claim and fact checks by other agencies.
More Lead Stories fact checks on claims involving Esspots can be found here. Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to Jimmy Kimmel can be found here. Our fact checks of claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.
