🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
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.
NewsGuard 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 breaking it from the inside.
Tracing how some of these claims originated and spread so widely across the Internet provides insights into the workings of our current information ecosystem, and how it can be so easily exploited to define breaking news stories before the stories are fully understood—or at least to muddy the waters for the people who turn to certain outlets and social media accounts for their news.
One major thread of misinformation about the attack emerged from an innocent error by a mainstream news organization—the San Francisco-based Fox affiliate KTVU—which, two hours after news of the attack broke, reported that DePape was arrested in his underwear. The article was corrected approximately two hours later, as there was no evidence that DePape was wearing only underwear. The claim was refuted three days later in federal charging documents, which included testimony from DePape confessing to the break-in and said that DePape was wearing shorts with pockets. But the damage had already been done.
NewsGuard identified at least 70 Facebook posts, tweets, TikTok videos, and articles, combined, all of which cited KTVU, falsely claiming that DePape was only wearing underwear during the attack—supposedly evidence that the men were involved in an intimate relationship.
This claim received a significant boost on Oct. 30 when Donald Trump Jr. retweeted an image of an underwear and hammer, captioned, "Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready." The post received approximately 19,000 likes. Other right-wing personalities played a major role in boosting the falsehood, including commentator Dinesh D'Souza, who posted four tweets mentioning that DePape had been wearing underwear.
As a result, even five days after the KTVU article had been corrected, and two days after prosecutors said that DePape confessed to the political nature of the attack, the false underwear claim continued to thrive on social media, illustrating the lasting influence of falsehoods when they are amplified by influencers. It also demonstrates the limitations of corrections, which, despite being intended to clarify and inform, are often entirely ignored by those who seek to muddy and misinform.
The false claim that there was a third person inside the Pelosi household during the attack did not originate from established news organizations. Rather, it was based on misreporting of an official statement, which was seized on by conspiracists. This highlights one of the most common tactics used by purveyors of misinformation: selectively citing authoritative sources when it supports their agenda.
The falsehood about a third person traces its roots to an Oct. 28 press conference by San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, who stated, "When the officers arrived and knocked on the front door of the residence this morning, the door was opened by someone inside." This remark was widely misinterpreted by social media users and others to mean that there was a third, unidentified person inside the house during the attack.
But when Politico and NBC News fumbled the details of who was inside the house, conspiracy theorists—who often are disparaging of established media outlets—were quick to cite them. An Oct. 28 Politico article that misleadingly said that "Officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person," was cited in at least 50 false and misleading articles and social media posts, NewsGuard found. (Politico promptly issued a correction to the initial story, clarifying that "there were only two people inside the Pelosi home when police arrived.")
Similarly, in an Oct. 30 segment of "Meet The Press," NBC correspondent Tom Winter falsely said that Scott "stated that there was a third person inside the house that opened the door for police when they were called to that house." (Though Winter subsequently corrected himself on Twitter, the clip of the segment remained uncorrected on NBC's website as of Nov. 3.)
Nevertheless, an Oct. 29 article from the The Gateway Pundit, whose rating by NewsGuard includes details about its history of publishing misinformation, stated that "Politico made the statement that the police were let inside by an unknown person. This is all over the Internet... Now people are wondering if there was a third person involved in the incident." An Oct. 30 article from The Gateway Pundit stated that NBC correspondent Tom "Winter also confirmed that a third person was in the Pelosi home at the time of the attack."
The Gateway Pundit often is dismissive and even downright hostile to mainstream news outlets such as Politico. By failing to take into account Politico's correction, Gateway Pundit promoted a false narrative while displaying how purveyors of misinformation use such sources: Despite their distrust of more traditional news providers, malign actors often rely on such outlets when it advances their agenda.
By Oct. 30, bad actors also had a powerful ally on their side, when Elon Musk, who had purchased the platform just two days earlier, tweeted a response to a post from Hillary Clinton about DePape's social media history of spreading conspiracy theories. Musk, who has 113 million Twitter followers, said in his tweet that there "might be more to this story than meets the eye," and linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer.
Neither Musk nor Twitter warned the platform's users that the Santa Monica Observer had previously failed basic criteria of journalistic practice. NewsGuard for several years has rated this site Red for being untrustworthy and cautioned readers to proceed with caution. The NewsGuard Nutrition Label for this site noted it previously advanced hoaxes, such as that Hillary Clinton was replaced by a body double in a September 2016 debate with Donald Trump.
The Santa Monica Observer article, titled "The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning," began by theorizing: "As SF's gay bars closed at 2 am, two gay men met in a bar and went home together. Happens every night in the City by the Bay. Except one of these two men was married to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
Beyond the unsubstantiated claim about DePape, the article cited many of the rumors circulating online at the time, including that DePape "was in his underwear." Following an intense backlash, Musk deleted the Tweet, but only after it had received approximately 99,000 likes. The Santa Monica Observer removed the article from the website on Nov. 1.
The spread of wild conspiracies after dramatic news events is not a new phenomenon. However, the social media environment in which they emerge has allowed false narratives to gain quick traction. As the false claims about the attack on Paul Pelosi show, when news consumers expect information immediately, stories that are developing, incomplete, and sometimes misreported in some details can easily be turned into enduring false narratives but far-reaching falsehoods, which are then intensified in the echo chambers on platforms such as Twitter. By Nov. 3, the hashtag #Pelosigaylover had been posted at least 40,000 times on Twitter.
To be clear, the spread of the conspiracies wasn't the result of just one tweet from Twitter's owner, an inaccurate report from a local news outlet, or the growing lack of faith in authority. Each of these factors converged into a baseless narrative that rapidly reached all corners of the Internet. By the time the U.S. Department of Justice had released its criminal complaint against DePape on Oct. 31 that directly refuted many of the falsehoods, an alternative reality had already etched itself into the public consciousness—at least in one camp of the highly polarized electorate.
For many, no piece of evidence contradicting the claim that Paul Pelosi somehow knew the perpetrator—including DePape's own testimony—will change the perceptions created before many of the facts were known. As social media continues to enable malign actors to make up unchecked narratives and to empower people to seek out only the information that they desire, entrenched false narratives will become increasingly common and damaging to the truth.
Lorenzo Arvanitis and McKenzie Sadeghi are analysts at NewsGuard, a news organization that rates and reviews news and information websites and that monitors and reports on misinformation.
