Advertisement

Woman says she was paid to claim Broward County sheriff forced her to get an abortion

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

A YouTube video claiming Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel impregnated a 17-year-old girl and forced her to get an abortion is a hoax, says the woman behind it. (CREDIT: Michele Eve Sandberg/Corbis via Getty Images)
A YouTube video claiming Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel impregnated a 17-year-old girl and forced her to get an abortion is a hoax, says the woman behind it. (CREDIT: Michele Eve Sandberg/Corbis via Getty Images)

A viral video claiming Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel impregnated a teen and made her get an abortion years ago is a hoax, says the woman behind it.

Israel, a Republican-turned-Democrat, became the subject of controversy last month, days after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14 that left 17 people dead. Amid the fallout from that shooting, Israel found himself targeted, not only for his department’s response to the tragedy, but for a years-old video posted in 2012, at the end of a bitter campaign cycle between Israel and the man he eventually ousted for sheriff’s office, Republican incumbent Al Lamberti.

The video, posted to YouTube, featured a woman who claimed that Israel had impregnated her when she was 17 years old and forced her to have an abortion to cover up their affair. “I’m sure [your wife] will be really happy about that,” the woman says.

Right-wing media uncovered the video on February 18 and boosted it. Before long, it had gone viral. “Broward County Sheriff Accused of Having Affair With 17-Year-Old Girl, Forcing Her to Get Abortion,” Gateway Pundit headlined an article on the video. On social media, the account that first discovered the clip, “An Open Secret,” tweeted the footage with the caption, “If the accusation was a lie, shouldn’t Israel have sued, or at least had lawyers threaten her to take the video down?” The post was subsequently retweeted hundreds of times.

The woman featured in the video, however, says the entire thing was made up.

“I was paid to say these things. I didn’t even know what I was saying,” she and her lawyer, Yechezkel Rodal, told Politico this week.

Advertisement

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous in order to avoid political retribution and harassment, said that the video was one of thousands she created through the website fiverr.com and that she didn’t actually know who Israel was when she made the video. She added that she had been paid $25 per video and that the payments came from an unknown individual. According to Politico, the other videos were mostly testimonials for products “ranging from cell phone plans to diet programs.”

After discovering that her video was being used to smear Israel following the Parkland shooting, the woman told Politico that she was shocked and tried to get the video removed, to no avail.

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

According to Politico, Google — which acquired YouTube in 2006 — has refused requests from both the woman and Israel to take the video down.

Advertisement

YouTube has become the subject of increasing scrutiny in recent months, most notably over its missteps in the wake of the Parkland shooting. After right-wing trolls found old footage of Parkland survivor David Hogg speaking to reporters about an incident he had witnessed at Redondo Beach in California in August 2017, conspiracy theorists pounced, claiming that Hogg was not a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, but a “crisis actor.” The video, originally uploaded to YouTube by user “mike m,” amassed hundreds of thousands of views in less than 24 hours and was featured at the top of YouTube’s “trending” list for hours before it was taken down for “harassment and bullying.”

Many criticized YouTube for allowing the conspiracy theory video to gain viral traction, unabated, with some arguing that YouTube itself was to blame for feeding into the hoax.

“Indeed, the attack on Hogg created a taste for more of the same, or at least YouTube did,” Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Virginia Heffernan wrote in February. “As Paul Lewis observed in the Guardian, YouTube with its ‘Up Next’ algorithm rewards consumers of pornography with more pornography, and propaganda with more propaganda. None of this is harmless. This is speech with real-life consequences.”

For its part, YouTube claims it has made moves to stop the viral traction these sorts of conspiracy theories often gain on its platform, installing more moderators and updating its abuse policy. “In 2017, we started rolling out changes to better surface authoritative news sources in search results, particularly around breaking news events,” the company said in a statement. “We’ve seen improvements, but in some circumstances these changes are not working quickly enough. In addition, last year we updated the application of our harassment policy to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies. Any video flagged to us that violates this policy is reviewed and then removed.”

The company admits, however, that its algorithm to identify such abusive content is far from perfect. “This video should never have appeared in Trending,” it stated, referring to the Hogg interview. “Because the video contained footage from an authoritative news source, our system misclassified it. As soon as we became aware of the video, we removed it from Trending and from YouTube for violating our policies.”