In October 2016, viral entertainment web sites such as Yikes.com published articles positing that two burglars had been sodomized for five straight days after they broke into the house of a “notorious gay sex predator” named Harry Harrington:

Two burglars got more than they bargained for recently after picking the wrong house to break into. Garfield Morgan, 54, and his 36 year old accomplice friend Kim Gorton are both career burglars, having stolen from hundreds of homes in their lives. But it’s unlikely they’ll go back to crime after the nasty episode they experienced in the home of one Florida man… Harry Harrington is 6’7″ and weighs over 300lbs. It’s pure muscle. He’s a notorious gay s*x predator who has served time in jail for numerous sexual assaults. An aggressive and predatory offender, he’s not the kind of man you want to annoy. But that’s just what Morgan and Gorton did that fateful night. Harrington, known as ‘The Wolfman‘, easily overpowered the men, tied them up and assaulted them for five full days. Police only intervened after a neighbor heard the men’s cries for help and called them.

There was no truth to this story. The newspaper clipping shown above originated with the Sunday Sport, a British tabloid that publishes a mixture of softcore pornography, gossip, and outlandish stories such as “Donkey Robs Bank,” and “Aliens Turned Our Son Into a Fish Finger.”

In addition to the story’s dubious source, the photographs included with it were also suspect. The image purportedly showing Harry “The Wolfman” Harrington has been circulating online since at least 2009, and one of the mugshots purportedly showing either “Garfield Morgan” or “Kim Gorton” actually depicts a man named Michael Patrick Kelly who was arrested in 2004 for lewd conduct with a minor.

The premise of this rumor was repurposed in September 2017 for a fake news article which claimed that two looters (now named James Tobbes and Michael Smith) who were sodomized after breaking into a home during Hurricane Irma.”