Did basketball player LeBron James call Karoline Leavitt "KKK Barbie" in an interview and did she respond that her family "fought to end slavery" while his "came from Jamaica"? No, that's not true: A meme making that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on the page "America's Last Line of Defense" on May 18, 2025 with a caption that read:
LeBron messed with the wrong young woman. She did her research and put him right in his place.
The text in the image itself read:
Karoline Leavitt struck back at LeBron James after he referred to her as "KKK Barbie" in an interview.
"My family fought to end slavery," she clapped back, "While yours came here from Jamaica in the 1930s."
LeBron hasn't responded.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon May 19 09:25:35 2025 UTC)
A Google News search for stories mentioning "KKK Barbie" did not return any relevant results (archived here) indicating the purported interview never took place.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustrations. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
