Did a Facebook post confirm that Whoopi Goldberg's house burned during the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires? No, that's not true: The website the rumor was found on described itself as a page specializing in "Satire and Parody News," adding that their team is "dedicated" to bringing readers "the latest and greatest in fake news." The image seen in the social media post was "100.0%" likely made with AI, according to an AI image detector. An online news search did not find any evidence that the post was based in fact.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) where it was published on January 10, 2025. The image showed a house on fire in the background, while a billboard in the foreground read:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG'S HOME BURNT IN LATEST LOS ANGELES WILDFIRE, DAMAGE, ESTIMATED IN MILLIONS
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jan 20 14:21:28 2025 UTC)
The post's caption read, "Whoopi Goldberg's Los Angeles Mansion Destroyed by Wildfire, Losses in the Millions."
In the post's comments, the creator of the post linked an article from esspots.com (archived here). The headline was the same as what can be seen in the image accompanying the claim. The article goes on to state that Goldberg "confirmed the loss of her home," but did not state how or when or where the actress confirmed it. At the very end of the article, in bold, a sentence read, "Note: This is SATIRE, It's Not TRUE." Evidence of this is below. Highlighted by Lead Stories:
(Source: Esspots.com screenshot taken on Mon Jan 20 16:24:26 2025 UTC)
The "About Us" page of the site also has this disclaimer (archived here):
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.
Putting the image in an AI image detector like the DeepFake-O-Meter, created by the University of Buffalo, showed most detector tools assessed the image was "100.0%" likely to be AI-generated. Evidence of this is below:
(Source: Zinc.cse.buffalo.edu screenshot taken on Mon Jan 20 15:11:34 2025 UTC)
A Google News search of keywords related to this claim did not yield any evidence to corroborate the claim (archived here).
We have contacted Goldberg's agent and will update this article as appropriate when a relevant response is received.
At the time this was written, Snopes had reviewed the same claim.
More Lead Stories fact checks of claims concerning Whoopi Goldberg are here.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about the L.A. wildfires of January 2025 are here.
