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Fake Story

Did The Atlantic publish an op-ed saying that ending racism is worth a rise in sexual assaults by migrants? No, that's not true: As of this writing, the magazine's website did not show such an article. No other credible media outlet mentioned the purported story, and a supposed screenshot of it was a digital fabrication. A spokesperson for The Atlantic told Lead Stories that the article was "fake" and that the magazine reported it as a "trademark infringement".

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on April 17, 2025. It contained what looked like a screenshot of the headline of an Atlantic article. The embedded image read:

A Rise in Sexual Assaults By Migrants is a Price Worth Paying to End Racism.

Quasi-consensual encounters between refugees and white western women may help with assimilation, says one Harvard academic.

By Debbie Goldstein.

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)

On April 17, 2025, a spokesperson for The Atlantic told Lead Stories via email:

This is fake; it is not a screenshot of an actual Atlantic article. We have published no such thing. We have reported this as fake and as a trademark infringement.

For those who are sharing this image: it's remarkably easy to verify if something is real - or not - by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site.

The magazine's search tool did not show the article in question:

(Source: The Atlantic screenshot by Lead Stories)

A Google search across the Altantic website did not produce an exact match for the headline from viral image, either:

(Source: Google screenshot by Lead Stories)

Furthermore, a Google search didn't even show a single mention of the supposed author's name on the Atlantic website in 2025:

(Source: Google screenshot by Lead Stories)

Additionally, a search across Google News for the story's title did not show any results:

(Source: Google News screenshot by Lead Stories)

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Fake screenshots purporting to show Atlantic articles populated social media before. Lead Stories wrote about three of such cases in the fall of 2024. Those fact checks can be found here, here and here.