After Hit-and-Run, Sarah Palin Emerges from Coma, Identifies Attackers-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was in a coma after a hit-and-run, and she later emerged from the coma to identify her attackers.
The Truth:
False reports that Sarah Palin was in a coma after a hit-and-run accident, and later emerged from the coma to identify her attackers, spread across fake news sites in late April and early May of 2017.
It’s not clear exactly where the report that Sarah Palin was in a coma originated, but it has been widely circulated on disreputable websites like CMGReport.com, which was created in September 2016 and is registered to an owner in Macedonia. The same story appeared across a range of pop-up fake news websites like CMGReport:
It seems as though there may be more than the normal forces at play here.
Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin was the victim of a horrendous crime this morning while driving to meet a friend on the Pacific Coast Highway. She was run off the road in what authorities are calling a hit-and-run and nearly killed. The SUV she was driving rolled over several times and ended up in a drainage ditch.
Governor Palin was taken to a local hospital under an alias in case the hit and run was on purpose and not a random act of reckless driving. According to her spokesman, she is currently in a coma with 2 broken vertebrae and a broken thigh.
These reports were accompanied by a photo of an SUV overturned in a drainage ditch beside a highway that was presumably the vehicle that Sarah Palin was driving at the time of the hit-and-run. However, the photo was actually taken at the scene of a fatal accident in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2015. Of course, that accident did not involve Sarah Palin:
Reports that Sarah Palin was in a coma after a hit-and-run gained new legs on May 1 when a fake news follow-up report claimed that Palin had emerged from the coma and had identified her attackers: