A screenshot shows a Newsweek article headlined: “Melania Trump e-files for divorce as Trump campaign tanks, sentencing looms”.
This is not a genuine screenshot and Newsweek has not published an article with this headline. There’s no evidence the claim is true and it appears to have been circulated as an experiment.
What looks like a screenshot of a Newsweek post reporting that former First Lady Melania Trump has filed for divorce is circulating online. But the tweet is fake and no such article was published by the outlet.
The screenshot seemingly shows a Newsweek post on X (formerly Twitter) sharing an article it published with the headline: “Melania Trump e-files for divorce as Trump campaign tanks, sentencing looms”.
However, Newsweek has confirmed that it has not published any such article. It did publish an article with the same photo of Mrs Trump as appears in the screenshot, but this was in 2019, it has a different headline, and is not about filing for divorce.
Full Fact could find no credible sources reporting on Mrs Trump filing for divorce.
Moreover, the false claim was seemingly first shared as an “experiment” by Rebekah Jones—a data scientist who helped to build Florida’s Covid-19 database and accused the US Department of Health of manipulating Covid data to relax pandemic restrictions in 2020. Her X bio says “Retired Whistleblower”.
In a TikTok video with overlaid text saying “the experiment”, she says: “I made an obviously fake Newsweek post” and “millions of people have seen this fake tweet about Melania and Donald filing for divorce”.
In a blog post, she outlines details from her original false post—Mrs Trump e-filing for divorce at 5.12pm, for example—that are identical to details appearing in subsequent posts sharing the claim on social media, both with and without the screenshot of the Newsweek article.
In the video, she claimed the “experiment” was to “measure the different systems on social media and how they deal with misinformation”.
We’ve come across many examples of fake screenshots supposedly showing headlines from genuine media organisations, including the BBC, the Telegraph, Sky News and the Guardian. Before sharing such posts, it’s important to check whether the article actually appears on the media organisation’s website, or if the story has been reported elsewhere beyond social media.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Newsweek confirmed it has not published this article.
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