Birth of the Fake Pelosi Story

Limited information, unintentional misreporting and bad actors on social media turned the Pelosi attack into a false narrative

- Lorenzo Arvanitis, McKenzie Sadeghi

An intruder barges into the house of the person who is second in line to the presidency, and strikes her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Yet millions of people—including politicians, public figures, and the richest man in the world—seemingly believe that the incident was not a political attack at all, but a drunken lover’s quarrel.

Although the outlandish narratives about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi have generated widespread attention, the tactics used to spread them have generally been overlooked. A NewsGuard analysis of false narratives related to the incident reveals how the Paul Pelosi conspiracy went from fringe to mainstream in a matter of days, enabled by the limited information and unintentional misreporting that often accompany developing news stories, and dramatically amplified by a cast of malign actors taking advantage of social media’s speed and reach. These included right-wing personalities who were seeking to shift the narrative away from the notion that the attack was an act of political violence fueled by the rhetoric of the right.

News Guard identified four main false claims that converged into the unfounded narrative that Pelosi and the assailant, David DePape, were secretly involved in an intimate relationship: that DePape was in his underwear when the police arrived at the scene; that Pelosi and DePape were friends; that a third person was inside the house but did not do anything to stop or report the incident and that the pattern of the shattered glass from the house’s rear door could only have been produced by someone