Did Hillary Clinton’s Emails Include Evidence of Child Sex Trafficking?
A viral Facebook post claims to show images that were found on the laptops of Hillary Clinton and Anthony Weiner. The post has been shared 6,700 times and viewed 1.3 million times, and it is part of the Pizzagate conspiracy, which claims that Clinton and other politicians and celebrities are involved in a child sex-trafficking ring. Warning to readers: Several of the images in the Facebook post are highly graphic.
The first image is of a girl with the caption: “This was found and [sic] Hillary Clinton email and She [sic] was 15 years old.” The girl in the image is Scarlett Keeling, a 15-year-old British tourist who was sexually assaulted and killed in India in February 2008. There is not the slightest bit of evidence to connect Clinton to the crime—a man named Samson D’Souza was convicted of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” in July 2019. Clinton’s email scandal was regarding her use of a private server as secretary of state, an office she didn’t assume until almost a year after Keeling was killed. The WikiLeaks’ archive of Clinton’s leaked emails goes from June 30, 2010 to August 12, 2014, and does not return any results for searches of “Scarlett Keeling” or any variations of her name or words associated with her case. There is no evidence that any of the other images the post purports are from Clinton emails either.
Another image shows what appears to be a mutilated child, with a caption claiming that Clinton cut the girl’s face off. The picture is, in fact, the highly graphic cover of a 1997 heavy metal album titled “Verses of the Bleeding” by band Abnegation. The picture on Facebook has another caption, allegedly a quote from a New York Police Department chief: “‘What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,’ the NYPD Chief said. ‘There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to WikiLeaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.’”
The quote from the “NYPD Chief” is from a 2016 article—accurately described in a Vox article as “transparently silly”—published by True Pundit, a website infamous for spreading misinformation and conspiracies. Despite the promise in the 2016 article, the emails supposedly proving Clinton engaged in a litany of crimes, including sex with minors, never surfaced.
