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Snopes Debunker

Unraveling claim Melania was an escort before meeting Trump at Ghislaine Maxwell party

Over the past two weeks, social media posts on sites from X to Facebook shared a boilerplate story alleging that Melania Trump worked as an escort in New York City before meeting her husband, President Donald Trump.

The posts went on to claim that the two met at a party hosted by disgraced socialite and convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, a long-time associate of Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019. Snopes reporter Jack Izzo investigated these claims and checked them against the verifiable facts.

Did Florida ban 'The Diary of Anne Frank'? Here's the truth

Florida didn’t ban "The Diary of Anne Frank" statewide, as posts suggest. A graphic-novel adaptation was removed from some schools' shelves.

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Snopes has been busy fact-checking political claims, including President Donald Trump’s new administration. But we look into claims on every topic, not just politics. For instance, one of our favorite fact checks that published this weekend was about a method of debate in ancient Persia that required all the participants to get drunk. It’s featured later in this newsletter. We need your help to keep doing this far-ranging work. By building our membership, we will be able to continue cutting straight to the facts on any subject our readers are interested in. We appreciate any support you can give.

Vance claimed every major conflict has ended with negotiations. That's not true

Plenty of wars in human history have ended otherwise, despite the U.S. vice president's claim.

Did chemotherapy drugs to treat cancer really come from mustard gas?

Yale pharmacologists in the 1940s realized mustard gas attacked white blood cells, which could have therapeutic properties in lymphatic cancers.

Did ancient Persians debate important matters both drunk and sober before making decisions?

This assertion came from ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who was not always a reliable source and never actually traveled to Persia.

Staff Pick

Did Trump only score 73 on IQ test in 1st year at New York Military Academy?

Besides describing himself as a “stable genius,” Trump famously boasted of having “one of the highest IQs” of anyone, an assertion that’s very difficult to verify in the absence of documentation that his IQ has even been tested.

The internet, as one might predict, thinks it knows precisely what Trump’s IQ score is, thanks to the wide circulation of what appears to be a news story revealing he received the very low (as in “borderline impaired”) score of 73 on an IQ test he took at the New York Military Academy in his early teens. Does the reporting hold up? Snopes fact-checker Laerke Christensen has the goods.