Articles and social media posts have claimed that DiCaprio is connected to Ukraine because his late maternal grandmother was born in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. Some articles claimed that DiCaprio’s $10 million donation was announced by an organization called the International Visegrad Foundation.
The $10 million non-existent donation saga is a case study of how false information can leak from the internet into the mainstream media, with one after the other, big and small alike, simply repeating history without independently verifying it.
Story with a bad source
On Saturday, a little-known website dedicated to news about the South American country of Guyana, GSA News, published a short article claiming that “sources inside Ukraine” said that DiCaprio “transferred ten million US dollars to the government of Ukraine.” He added that DiCaprio “has Ukrainian roots through his maternal grandmother.”
GSA News founder Patrick Carpen stood by the story Wednesday afternoon, even after being told a source close to DiCaprio told CNN that the content was false. Karpen said in an email to CNN: “I really trust my source in Ukraine.”
However, on Wednesday night, Karpen called CNN to say, “I deeply apologize” for the false story, that he “didn’t have bad intentions in publishing this article” and that he was going to publish a retraction, which he later did.
Karpen explained that his main source for DiCaprio’s alleged $10 million donation was a Facebook post from a Ukrainian woman whose messages about the war with Russia were generally accurate. Karpen said he also saw other Ukrainians post on Facebook about the alleged donation.
Since his website in Guyana has a small audience, Karpen said he thought that if he published an article repeating DiCaprio’s story and it turned out to be false, he could safely remove the article within a few days.
“I thought it wouldn’t have much impact if it turned out to be false,” he said.
Instead, he says, he watched with surprise and dismay as the story “snowballed through all the news outlets, some with millions of subscribers. .”
However, he admitted that he himself took the statement from the Facebook posters at face value.
To Twitter, then to another obscure website, then to the mainstream media.
Whether because of the GSA News article, or because of Ukrainian posts on Facebook, or for some other reason, the story about DiCaprio began to spread more widely on Sunday.
Twitter account called Vysehrad 24, which tweets news updates on the Visegrad countries Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to over 196,000 followers, posted an unattributed tweet claiming “Leonardo DiCaprio donated $10 million to Ukraine. His maternal grandmother was a native of Odessa, Ukraine!” Claims that DiCaprio’s maternal grandmother Helen Indenbirken was born in Ukraine in general or Odessa in particular have been circulating online for years. However, these claims have never been linked to a reliable source. Indenbirken died in 2008 in Germany, where she lived; Thursday, it was not clear where she was actually born, and a source close to DiCaprio did not say.
Over 10,000 retweets
Despite this, Visegrád 24’s tweet has been retweeted over 10,000 times. It was taken down Wednesday afternoon after CNN told the account that the story about the $10 million donation was false.
“It seems that we ourselves have become a victim of a fake story. It happens to the best of us!” A rep for the account said in a CNN post Wednesday.
So where did the account get the information from? “We saw this story tweeted by several small news accounts, citing an anonymous source,” the spokesperson said.
Major media pick up the story
On Monday, the day after the Visegrád 24 tweet was posted, the story really took off.
An article on another obscure website, Polish News, reported that DiCaprio “allocated as much as $10 million to support Ukraine and had no plans to announce it to the whole world,” but that on Sunday the donation was announced by the International Visegrad Fund, which is an international donor organization established by the governments of the Visegrad Group countries.
Again, not true. The foundation’s communications manager, Lucia Bekova, said in an email to CNN Wednesday that the foundation made no such announcement.
The Polish news may have confused the International Visegrad Fund with the Visegrad 24 Twitter account. By Wednesday, the Polish News article had been edited to remove the reference to the International Visegrad Fund, and the site did not express strong credibility for the rest of the story. Polish News spokesman Artur Salamonczyk said in an email on Wednesday that if CNN learns that DiCaprio did not make the $10 million donation, “we would be happy to remove the content.”
By Thursday, the article had been taken down and another article published saying reports of DiCaprio’s $10 million donation were incorrect. By then, however, the horse was out of the barn.
News outlet after news outlet cited Polish News as the main source for their reports that DiCaprio had made a $10 million donation to Ukraine.
News reports of a $10 million donation were published by, among others, the English newspaper The Independent (which eventually changed its article) and daily mail (which deleted its article), India’s The Hindustan Times (whose story remained online as of Friday), Czech’s Novinky (who eventually published a new article debunking its original), Euronews in France (who eventually changed its story) and, in the US, entertainment site ET Online (which removed DiCaprio from an article about celebrity donations in Ukraine) and conservative political websites The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller (both amended their articles). CNN began looking into the alleged $10 million donation after Jane Litvinenko, senior fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, issues raised on the validity of the viral story on Twitter on Wednesday.