Robert Barnes has been a reporter and editor at The Washington Post for more than 30 years. For the past 12, he has covered the Supreme Court.
This week he experienced something he says was a first in his career: a storm of commentators, many anonymous, swarming his social media accounts and email inbox to tell him that something he saw with his own eyes and reported in The Post did not actually happen: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, alive and well, attending a performance about her life at a museum in Washington — her first public appearance since she underwent cancer surgery in December.
A falsehood has been spreading in dark corners of the Internet that Ginsburg is dead — and in the hours after Barnes published his report, conspiracy theorists pelted him with their doubt-mongering. Photos were not allowed at the event, so one of the doubters emailed Barnes 21 questions about Ginsburg’s appearance — the size of her security detail, what gender they were, for example — telling Barnes that if he did not answer every single one of them, it would be a sign his article was not to be believed.
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The Fox News show “Fox & Friends” briefly aired a graphic indicating that Ginsburg had died, then quickly apologized. James Woods, an actor who is a mainstay of the conspiracy-laden parts of the pro-Trump Internet, helped get the hashtag #WheresRuth trending on Twitter on Jan. 28. Two days later, Sebastian Gorka — a former adviser of President Trump’s — tweeted “Still no sign” to his 700,000 followers, noting the State of the Union was about a week away.
