STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.
Did tabloid news outlet TMZ publish a report saying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy bought a Los Angeles mansion belonging to Sean "Diddy" Combs for $61 Million? No, that's not true: Using TMZ's search box, Lead Stories found no such story about Diddy. Searching for Zelenskyy's name similarly showed no such TMZ story.
The claim appeared in a Feb. 18, 2026 X post (archived here) on the @akafaceUS account with text that read:
Zelensky demanding billions in US aid while secretly dropping $61M on Diddy's freak-off mansion is honestly an impressive grift.
Here's what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of X post https://x.com/akafaceUS/status/2024170943132946441.)
Lead Stories tested the claim about TMZ by searching TMZ's own search pages:
Using the terms Zelenskyy and Diddy here's what TMZ's search function reported (archived here):
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of TMZ search result.)
To test whether TMZ's search function will carry out searches for two different people in a single search, we used the terms Diddy and Trump, finding (archived here) that when two names are in a TMZ story, TMZ's search engine will find such stories:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of TMZ search result.)
Lead Stories cross-checked TMZ's search system by asking Google News' index of thousands of news sites included any mention of the terms TMZ report, Zelenskyy bought, Diddy mansion. Google News reported (archived here) finding no mention of those terms on any of the sites it indexes.
Updates:
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2026-02-18T22:17:03Z 2026-02-18T22:17:03Z Updated to add archive links to key evidence.
