By Archis Chowdhury
A fabricated document falsely claiming that physicist Stephen Hawking liked watching "undressed midgets solve complex equations" is viral on the internet as real.
BOOM found that an image purporting to show a screenshot from a page out of the unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents was shared by a user on Twitter as a meme, which was then picked up and made viral as real.
This is being shared amid the unsealing of previously redacted court documents revealing new details about the lawsuit against Epstein, including the names of his former associates, including former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Jeffrey Epstein, first arrested for sexually assaulting a minor in 2005, died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial. The high-profile even case led to the sentencing of British socialite and Epstein's former partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was accused of sex trafficking in a lawsuit filed by Virginia Guiffre, another one of Epstein's victims. The names that are released in these newly unsealed court documents, however, do not mean that all the people named are accused of wrongdoing. The document names witnesses, victims, and even Epstein's employees who were involved in the lawsuit.
Hawking's name was one of the many names that were mentioned in the documents, with the full extent of his involvement with Epstein not yet known to the public.
After the release of the first part of the documents, names of several high-profile individuals were linked to what has been dubbed as "Epstein's list", which included the names of former US President Bill Clinton, and that of Hawking, causing a massive uproar on social media.
Soon after, the internet was flooded with claims suggesting that Hawking liked watching "undressed midgets (people with dwarfism) solve complex equations on a too-high-up chalkboard". This claim was made through the transcript of a conversation, purportedly from the questioning of one of the witnesses in the case.
A barrage of memes followed, referencing to this claim as real.
Similar claims were also found being shared widely in French.
Fact Check
BOOM viewed the entirety of the first tranche of the unsealed documents, and looked for any mention of the terms "stephen hawking" using the search function on Adobe Reader.
Searching through the 943 pages of the document, we were only able to find one mention of Stephen Hawking (in page 391), which appeared to be an email sent by Epstein to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
In the email, he allegedly urges Maxwell to sent out a reward to friends and family members of Virginia Giuffre - an alleged victim of Esptein and Maxwell's, and one of the leading accusers of sexual trafficking in the case - to come forward and prove her allegations regarding Hawking's participation in an underage orgy as false.
We were unable to the portion of the transcript containing the allegation that Hawkings liked to watch "undressed midgets solve complex equations" in the entire document.
Furthermore, we found a few tweets containing this claim, that were accompanied by a 'Community Notes' - which allows users to add context to misleading, false or de-contextualised information.
The community notes provideda link to the original tweet that shared the image of the transcript.
We found the user adding an Alternative Text that says "MEME", suggesting that the transcript was fabricated, and shared as a joke.
