Does the mugshot of a weeping teenager show identify someone arrested in connection with one of the March, 2025 attacks by vandals on Tesla dealerships and Tesla vehicles? No, that's not true: the mugshot was published nine years earlier. It appeared in 2016 reports about the arrest of Anthony J. Zingale, of Grafton, WI, for alleged sexual assault of a woman in nearby Plymouth.
The image appeared with a March 21, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) under the title: "TERR0RlST". It opened:
- Destroying personal property and #Tesla buildings is all fun and games for #Democrats until they get caught and face 20 years in the slammer.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Mar 25 00:11:36 2025 UTC)
Multiple Wisconsin news outlets published the photo of Zingale, who was 19 at the time, with their reports, like this one in the Sheboygan Press, (archived here) about his arrest for allegedly entering an occupied bathroom during a house party and threatening to cut the woman he found there if she did not have sex with him.
Lead Stories queried Google News' index of thousands of news sites, using the search terms "Tesla" and "Zingale" and "attack", (archived here) which found no reports of any Tesla-related arrests of Zingale:
(Source: News.Google.Com screenshot taken Tue Mar 25 00:21 2025 UTC)
An image search on Google turned up only a long list of memes and tweets mocking Zingale, but no reports of a Tesla-related arrest of the person shown in that mugshot.
Read more Lead Stories fact checks about Tesla here.
