Fox News has falsely implicated the protester who was beaten up at a Donald Trump rally in a case of voter fraud involving absentee ballots issued in the name of his “dead” grandmother.

Austyn Crites, a Republican protester who was assaulted at a Trump rally in Nevada, was stunned to see a TV report on Monday associating him with fraudulent voting connected to a grandmother Fox News claimed died in 2002.

However, the Guardian met Wilda Austin, 90, in her living room in suburban Reno late on Monday. She was alive and well, although somewhat baffled that she was having to prove her identity to correct a TV broadcast that reported that she died 14 years ago.

“Please correct the record,” she said, arms crossed.



She declined to appear on camera, in part because the family has been subjected to a torrent of abuse and threats since Crites, 33, an inventor, was ejected from the Trump rally for holding a sign that read “Republicans against Trump.”

He was punched, kicked, wrestled to the ground and held in a chokehold by Trump supporters at the rally. The incident led to a security scare after someone in the crowd shouted that he was armed, sparking panic through the auditorium and prompting security service agents to rush the nominee from the stage.

The account Crites gave of his experience, relayed to the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington film series, went viral over the weekend, and has been viewed more than 7.5m times.

Although his grandmother did not want to appear on camera, she did agree to meet Jacqueline Evans, a licensed notary for the state of Nevada, who was hired by the Guardian to inspect Wilda Austin’s social security documents and birth certificate and check her signature.

She verified her signature, took her thumbprint, and obtained a sworn affidavit confirming her identity. Evans said she was satisfied about Wilda Austin’s identity. “Wilda’s very much is alive,” she said.

The erroneous Fox News report was broadcast on the eve of election day and at a febrile moment in US politics when Trump and his supporters have questioned the reliability of the electoral process.

In unprecedented remarks, Trump has repeatedly said that, if he loses, he may not concede, claiming that the election could somehow be “rigged”. He and others associated with the Republican nominee’s campaign have stoked conspiracies about the existence of widespread voter fraud that have been debunked by independent experts.

The Fox News host Brian Kilmeade couched his segment about Crites and his grandmother, which was labelled “Reno Trump protester linked to voter fraud”, as evidence that voting scams are not as unusual as Democrats say.

“This morning, yet another reminder [of voter fraud] from the guy who interrupted Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday, who many people thought had a gun,” Kilmeade said.

“He claimed he was a Republican, but it turns out he’s a huge Hillary supporter, and his grandmother has been using [his] address to vote absentee for years. But she’s been dead since 2002.”

Kilmeade added: “Although I miss her, I don’t think she should be voting.”

The Fox News host then turned to J Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice attorney and pundit for the network. “This is going on all over the country,” Adams said. “It’s a federal felony.”

Crites said he was shocked when he watched the report, which he described as one of a cascade of false claims made about him in the past 48 hours, some of which have been propagated by the Trump campaign.

Less than an hour after Crites had been wrestled to the ground, the Republican nominee’s son, Donald Trump Jr, and senior social media aide, Dan Scavino, retweeted claims that the protester was behind an “assassination attempt”.

Neither corrected the false claims. Confronted over the falsehoods, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, defended their tweets. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Conway said of Crites: “This is a Democratic plant or operative trying to disrupt our rally.”

Crites is not a Democrat. He has been a registered Republican since 2011, and was previously an independent. A fiscal conservative who is supporting other Republicans this election, he said he protested of his own volition because he believes Trump is “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”.

Crites voluntarily told the Guardian that, despite not agreeing with all of Clinton’s platform, he had canvassed “for a few hours” for the Democratic nominee and donated to her campaign.

He was not, as has been claimed on social media, the same protester who interrupted Trump at a rally in Florida.

The conspiracy about Crites that has been most widely circulated since his protest on Saturday is the claim that he was a Democratic operative connected to John Podesta, a revelation supposedly contained in the WikiLeaks disclosures of the Clinton campaign chair’s emails.

The claim, which is false, may have been the source of Conway’s false declaration to CNN that Crites was a Democratic “operative”.



The name “Austyn Crites” was not connected to the Podesta disclosures, but an entirely unrelated Wikileaks disclosure, in 2012, based on a internal documents belonging to the global intelligence company Stratfor. Crites said his name only appeared in the leak because he was listed as a subscriber to one of Stratfor’s newsletters.

The genesis of the fake story about Crites’ grandmother, and the way in which it bubbled through from blogs to a Fox News report, seemingly without any attempt at corroboration, is unclear.

Both of Crites’ grandmothers are alive, but the trail of false allegations leads to Wilda Austin, who resides at his family address.

A Twitter user first made the false connection between Crites, whom it called the “Trump Reno assassin” and his “dead granny” on Sunday afternoon. The post caused a stir on Reddit, before being picked up by a rightwing news website called The Gateway Pundit.



It appears the original tweet, the Reddit post, the rightwing news website and Fox News all misidentified Crites’ grandmother for another Wilda Austin, who is deceased, but lived in Utah.