Forty Two Midgets Mutilated by a Lion in Cambodia Contest–Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
The story appears to be a BBC report about an alleged fight in a Cambodian arena between 42 midgets and an African lion.
The story says that the midgets were of the Cambodian Midget Fighting League and that 28 of them died before the contest was halted.
The Truth:
This circulated pretty quickly around the Internet during May, 2005, but it never really appeared on the BBC site because it was a hoax.
The story was originally posted at http://lionvs40midgets.tripod.com.
Later, the author posted an apology and an admission that it was a hoax.
Tripod quickly shut the site down saying it violated its policies.
The apology page said that the author created the hoax “to ‘settle’ a dispute between a friend of mine in which he claimed that 40 weaponless midgets could defeat 1 lion in a hypothetical fight. Many of my other friends and I tried to convince him that the lion would definitely win, but he would not back down from his argument. After seeing another fake article posing as BBC about ‘zombism’ in Cambodia, I got the idea to make this fake news article to try and convince him for the final time.”
He said he had given the link to the article to a small group of friends and never intended for it to spread beyond that, but it did.
Last updated 5/20/05