Did the New York Times publish a story headlined "Pope Leo XIV Was a Founding Member of the 2020 Anarchist Portland Autonomous Zone Known as CHAZ"? No, that's not true: A faked screenshot of such a headline also claimed Robert Francis Prevost spent time writing for an "anarchist zine" in Portland about how to "fist-fight police officers". No such article appeared on the website of the New York Times according to multiple searches and the "CHAZ" protest area was located in Seattle, not Portland.
The fake headline appeared in an image on X (archived here) published on May 9, 2025 with a caption that read:
wait how woke is this pope
This is the image in question:
(Image source: downloaded from the @jeremysmiles account on X)
The subtitle in the image read "Robert Francis Prevost spent much of his time in the early COVID-19 pandemic writing an anarchist zine in Portland describing how to best fist-fight police officers."
The typography and lay-out of the screenshot match the one used by the New York Times, compared to the one used in this actual New York Times story from 2020 (archived here):
(Image source: NYT screenshot)
That story also had more information about the location of the "CHAZ" protest area, which was in Seattle:
The police have identified a suspect and prosecutors decided to charge him with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a man in June that took place during protests in Seattle seeking racial justice, the authorities said on Wednesday.
...
The killing was among several shootings in and around a six-block area that protesters controlled for several weeks. The area was alternately called the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). It was cleared out by the police on July 1.
(highlights by Lead Stories)
Searches of Google (archived here), Google News (archived here) and the website of the New York Times (archived here) for the phrase "Pope Leo XIV Was a Founding Member of the 2020 Anarchist Portland Autonomous Zone Known as CHAZ" brought up no results.
