A fabricated tweet has resurfaced an old conspiracy theory linking the untimely deaths of high-profile people to Hillary Clinton.
Shared online as a screenshot, the supposed tweet appears to be posted to a verified account for Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer fatally shot by actor Alec Baldwin with a prop gun on Oct. 21.
It claims Hutchins possesses incriminating evidence on the former United States presidential candidate (here).
It reads: “I have information that will lead to Hillary Clinton’s arrest” and is timestamped 13.35 on Oct. 18 – three days before Hutchins was killed.
“Just stay away from those Clintons….that’s got to be about 80 and counting….clintocided,” said one person who shared the screenshot on Twitter (here).
Another said on Instagram: “Nothing to see ere… just the lady that got killed by accident *wink wink* by a prop gun (here).
The screenshot, however, is fake.
There is no verified Twitter account for Hutchins – nor one matching the profile picture in the screenshot.
A search for the Twitter handle does pull up an account for a Halyna Hutchins, which was registered in April – but there is no evidence of activity on the page (twitter.com/HalynaHutchins/).
Another account for Hutchins (twitter.com/androsovych) followed by her husband Ben (here) also shows no evidence of any activity.
Moreover, the exact wording used in the purported tweet about Clinton has been used in other falsified posts shared online in the aftermath of previous celebrity deaths.
Reuters has covered this narrative before in relation to the late chef Anthony Bourdain (here).
VERDICT
False. Halyna Hutchins did not tweet three days before she died about possessing incriminating evidence on Hillary Clinton.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.