Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, in October 2020 (Illustration) – Jacqueline Larma / AP / SIPA
- A reader of 20 Minutes asked the Fake Off section to verify the veracity of a press release attributed to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, in which he would denounce the existence of a gigantic pedophile ring.
- “Washington DC’s pedophile network is the largest in the world”, we can read in particular in this text, published at the end of April by conspiracy and survivalist sites.
- This press release is actually a fake published in the year 2016 by a Twitter account which usurped the identity of Rudy Giuliani.
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The former mayor of New York and former lawyer of Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, is known for his sulphurous speeches. But this would be beyond comprehension. According to a supposedly official statement attributed to him, “Washington DC’s pedophile ring is the largest in the world, and London probably comes in second”.
This text, which is actively circulating on WhatsApp, was published on April 29 by two conspiratorial and survivalist sites, Words of God and
Jacob’s Ladder. It is written that the “PizzaGate” scandal – a conspiracy theory according to which a Washington DC pizzeria is at the center of a huge pedophile ring – is a reality and that the American state, like the media, are complicit in these. abuses.
Rudy Giuliani himself would have known of their existence for a long time: “Although I have never participated in these atrocious acts, I know people who have done it and […] who escaped prosecution. I don’t have time to explain why I was silent for so long, but I would say that I would never have become mayor of New York if I had not played the game… ”
A reader of 20 Minutes, who received links to this press release by message, asked the Fake Off section to verify its veracity.
FAKE OFF
The Jacob’s Ladder blog, on which the text was published in a French version, states that “Rudolph Giuliani was censored on Twitter and his account suspended. »To source the text, the site refers to a Twitter page dating from December 2016 and saved on the site archive.is.
The account that appears on the page was created in April 2016, and is called @ RudolphGiuliani. It sports a photo of Donald Trump’s former lawyer and claims in a biography that he is “the official account of Rudy Giuliani – lawyer, businessman, former politician, and orator from New York.” In fact, this account was created by someone impersonating Rudy Giuliani on Twitter.
On his page, he multiplies allusions to pedophile conspiracies and PizzaGate. On December 20, 2016, the account published the famous “official statement” in its English version, before being suspended by Twitter.
The American news outlet Snopes devoted an article to this press release in December 2016. He explains that Rudy Giuliani then did not have a Twitter account, which had already embarrassed him on several occasions. “There are at least four accounts that pretend to be me,” the lawyer explained to
NBC, after posting another fake tweet.
Today, Giuliani does have an official certified Twitter account, whose nickname is @RudyGiuliani. The latter was created in August 2016, before the publication of the Snopes article. Which implies that the former mayor of New York and his communications teams have recovered one of the four accounts that previously usurped his identity.
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