Did actress and singer Selena Gomez die in early December 2024 as an anonymously published article announced? No, that's not true: Gomez was alive as of December 12, 2024 as evidenced by public sightings and social media posts. The article appeared on a website full of other stories about celebrities supposedly passing away which was registered in Armenia only a few months ago and which pretends to be based at a non-existent address in New York.
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 website named "Full Story" with a misspelled header that says it publishes "Intersting news". It listed the non-existent address "123 Main Street, New York, NY 10001" in its footer and provided no information about the owner or publisher. According to data from WHOIS (archived here) the website was registered earlier this year on March 27, 2024 by a company named "Gnewss" in Yerevan, Armenia. The main page of the website (archived here) listed many other articles about celebrities who allegedly passed away, all ostensibly written by a user named 'admin'.
The article did not include any details about Gomez's purported death and did not have a byline. 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 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.
