Did actress and singer Selena Gomez die in early December 2024? No, that's not true: Gomez was alive as of December 12, 2024. An article saying she died was published by a non-news website.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on December 8, 2024. The caption of the post read:
VERY SAD . 20 minutes ago in Chicago, Selena Gomez he has been confirmed as...Read more👇
https://fullstory.site/.../very-sad-20-minutes-ago-in.../
A collage of images was included in the post, with text superimposed on the collage that read, "DIED TODAY."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Dec 12 15:35:07 2024 UTC)
The link included in the post making the claim led readers to an article (archived here) on a non-news website. The article did not include any details about Gomez's purported death. It also referred to Gomez in the present tense, indicating she was still alive when the article was written.
Lead Stories used keywords on Google News to search for the claim that Gomez died (archived here). We found no credible documents or reporting to corroborate the claim. She was photographed attending the Academy Women's Luncheon at the Academy Museum Of Motion Pictures on December 10, 2024. Gomez's Instagram account has also been active since the post making the claim was published, with her seemingly announcing her engagement to producer and songwriter Benny Blanco on Instagram on December 11, 2024.
Lead Stories also performed a reverse image search on Google Lens to determine the origin of the image of Gomez in a hospital bed that's in the collage. The search led us to an article from Cosmopolitan with the image, which was originally posted on Gomez's Instagram account on September 14, 2017. The Instagram post describes Gomez's kidney transplant process, and in the image, she is lying next to her donor.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims involving celebrity deaths can be found here.
