Was Oprah Winfrey "ordered to return $22 million she took from FEMA to rebuild her mansion after the Maui fires", as of mid-August 2025? No, that's not true: The rumor originated from a post by a self-described satire account that carries a disclaimer that says "nothing on this page is real". There were no actual news stories about the order described in the post.
The claim originated from a post (archived here) published on Facebook on August 17, 2025. It shared a poster that opened:
Oprah Winfrey has been ordered to return $22 million she took from FEMA to rebuild her mansion after the Maui fires.
The problem was, her mansion had no damage. None at all.
She claimed the funds when the chaos was still everywhere and government adjusters couldn't get to everyone.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of a post by the America - Love It Or Leave It account on Facebook.com)
As seen in the screenshot above, the shared image showed a logo of "America's Last Line of Defense" in the bottom right corner. It's a network of satire websites run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine, along with a loose confederation of friends and allies. Those pages display satire disclaimers and predominantly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.
The America Love It or Leave It account (archived here) on Facebook that published the claim reviewed in this article showed a satire disclaimer, too:
A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.
The page's description additionally disclosed that the person responsible for it is Busta Troll, which is one of Blair's pseudonyms:
(Source: screenshot of the America - Love It Or Leave It account on Facebook.com)
Searches on Google and Yahoo for the keywords seen here (archived here) and here (archived here) did not show any credible news reports confirming the rumor.
Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites that omit the satire disclaimer and other hints that the stories are fake. One of the examples is a network run by a man from Pakistan named Kashif Shahzad Khokhar (aka "DashiKashi") who has spammed hundreds of such stolen stories into conservative and right-wing Facebook pages in order to profit from the ad revenue.
