The videos were initially posted at the tail end of the bare-knuckle 2012 campaign when Scott Israel (pictured) defeated Republican incumbent Al Lamberti. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo ‘Oh my God…It’s fake’: Far right falls for hoax about Broward County sheriff

In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, the far-right fever swamps buzzed with false information and conspiracy theories about student “crisis actors” who were paid to lie about the mass shooting.

But ironically, conspiracy-minded conservatives fell for a political hoax involving a different kind of actor. The subject? Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, Scott Israel.


Israel for the past month has been assailed as everything from a “rapist” to a philanderer to a crooked cop thanks to three old YouTube videos in which a mystery woman accused him of impregnating her when she was 17 and forcing her to get an abortion. The videos together have been viewed almost 130,000 times since the Feb. 14 shooting.

But all of it was a lie, the woman and her attorney, Yechezkel Rodal, now tell POLITICO, which found her by combing internet videos and social media.

“I was paid to say these things. I didn’t even know what I was saying,” said the woman, who spoke with POLITICO on condition of anonymity because she fears political retribution from Internet trolls or from the sheriff’s office, which does not know her identity. “I’m sorry … It’s fake.”

The revelation comes amid growing concerns about the spate of conspiracy theories and “false flag” attacks surrounding recent mass shootings — especially in Florida — that are surfacing on right-wing and fringe media sites.

The videos were initially posted at the tail end of the bare-knuckle 2012 campaign when Israel defeated Republican incumbent Al Lamberti. Now living in New York, the woman said she was 17 at the time and didn’t know Israel when an unknown person paid her $25 per video through the website www.fiverr.com , where she was hired by different companies to cut “thousands” of video testimonials for various products ranging from cell phone plans to diet programs. She expressed shock when informed Israel was sheriff and that the videos have become part of a smear campaign after the shooting.

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“Oh my God,” she said. “How do I get this off YouTube?”

She apparently can’t. YouTube’s parent company, Google, has refused her efforts and those of Israel to take them down — an intransigence that illuminates how new media firms have become platforms for fake news and take little corporate responsibility to combat it.

Florida, in particular, has been fertile ground for school-shooting “hoaxers.” A Tampa-area woman was sentenced to six months in federal prison last year for threatening the Palm Beach County father of a 6-year-old murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. In 2016, a professor was fired from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton after alleging Sandy Hook was a hoax and that the parents were “playing a role.”

After the Feb. 14 high school shooting that left 17 dead and 17 wounded in Parkland, Florida, students Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg were falsely called “crisis actors” as they criticized Republicans, President Trump and the National Rifle Association. Six days later, a Florida Republican state representative’s aide was fired after telling the Tampa Bay Times that the two “are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis [sic] when they happen.”

The “crisis actor” myth was abetted the day before, according to the Washington Post , by the far-right website Gateway Pundit which ran a story headlined “School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist David Hogg’s Father in FBI, Appears To Have Been Coached On Anti-Trump Lines.”

The website also initially disseminated a false story , later removed, that incorrectly said shooter Nikolas Cruz was a “registered Democrat” in a failed effort to discount media reports about his now-deleted social media profile that showed him with a “Make America Great Again” cap. Cruz had also been captured on video wearing that hat.

Sheriff Israel, who had also become a focus of conservative ire by then, was targeted in a Feb. 19 Gateway Pundit piece that promoted one of the phony videos in a story headlined “Broward County Sheriff Accused of Having Affair With 17-Year-Old Girl, Forcing Her to Get Abortion.”

The article, which referenced but didn’t link to a rebuttal video from Israel’s wife, explained that the “video was unearthed as Sheriff Israel has began [sic] using his position to lobby for Democratic policies in the wake of last week’s deadly school shooting.”

The story linked to the phony videos was largely ignored by the mainstream news media. But it took off on Twitter. Nearly all of the videos’ roughly 129,000 page views happened after the shooting. Of the 560 comments cumulatively attached to the three YouTube videos, only 12 were made before the shooting.

Amy Rose, Israel’s campaign manager in 2012 and 2016, said Israel and his staff were surprised at the return of the videos and the volume of vitriol in the comments on YouTube. She said they tried to have the videos removed in 2012, when they were pseudonymously posted by a “Barry Israel” in late October 2012.

“Now that these bogus, fake videos have been debunked we would ask that YouTube comply with our previous request (going back to 2012) and take them down!” she said in a written statement to POLITICO. “It's too bad that the young woman who was paid to repeat these lies can't identify the person who paid her to do so.”

Asked why it hasn’t removed the videos, Google said in an email that “YouTube has a built-in privacy complaint process, and we encourage people to let us know if videos or comments on the site violate their privacy. We may remove videos after receiving privacy complaints, which we review on a case-by-case basis.”

The statement added that company officials “consider first person privacy requests” and recommended the woman fill out a form “so our teams have a record of this complaint.”

The woman’s attorney, Rodal, said she has also “attempted to have the videos removed” since POLITICO first contacted her this week, but to no avail. He said she wishes to “remain anonymous to protect her reputation as well as to protect her safety in this volatile political climate.”

The sheriff’s office had been unable to find the woman or the person who hired her. A POLITICO reporter found her after posting Twitter messages linking to other videos the woman had made on other websites. A reader, recognizing the woman from a Florida college he attended with her, then contacted POLITICO with her identity. She spoke briefly with a POLITICO reporter and then referred questions to her attorney.

Rodal pointed out that she made the videos when she was 17 and didn’t know any better. “She has since moved on with her life and has begun a promising career in the health industry,” he said in an email.

“She has never met Scott Israel. She had been hired by hundreds of other fiverr.com users and recorded hundreds of endorsement videos for many different products in the past,” he said. “She has not recorded any such videos in four years. She deeply regrets the videos and deeply regrets any harm that may have come to Scott Israel as a result.”