Drunk Nancy Pelosi

Submission 17,342

Part of a series on Nancy Pelosi. [View Related Entries]

About

Drunk Nancy Pelosi refers to a slowed-down video of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaking at a Center for American Progress event that was widely circulated on Facebook in May 2019.

Origin

On May 22nd, 2019, the Facebook page Politics WatchDog^[1] posted a video of Nancy Pelosi speaking which was slowed down to make it seem as if Pelosi was drunk. The video gained over two million views and 45,000 shares in a day. The video has since been removed.

Precursor

Since 2008, Some Twitter users^[2] and far-right websites made claims against Pelosi leading some to think that she is an alcoholic.^[4] On August 7th, 2017, OurLandOfTheFree.com posted a story falsely reporting that Nancy Pelosi was involved in a serious car accident with a city bus in Los Angeles due to drunk driving.^[3]

Spread

On May 22nd, 2019 Rudy Giuliani shared the doctored video on Twitter saying, “What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre.” The tweet has since been deleted. On May 23rd, The Washington Post^[7] proved that the video was altered with a side-by-side video (shown below).

On May 23rd, Donald Trump posted another misleading edit of Pelosi speaking and included the caption “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE” (shown below). Hi tweet gained over 23,400 retweets and 72,300 likes in a day.

On May 24th, according to The Daily Beast,^[6] Fox and Friends correspondents Diamond and Silk commented on the videos claiming they question Pelosi's stability. Later Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy announced that he just found out that the video was fake.

The Daily Beast Article

On June 1st, 2019, The Daily Beast^[8] published an article titled "We Found the Guy Behind the Viral 'Drunk Pelosi' Video," which identified the man who originally uploaded the clip to Facebook as Shawn Brooks, a 34-year-old African American sports blogger and forklift operator from the Bronx in New York. In the article, The Daily Beast claims that a Facebook official assisted them in the investigation, saying they verified that the user originally posted the video to the group Politics WatchDog. Additionally, the article quotes Brooks denying that he created the video. Following the publication of the article, some criticized The Daily Beast for publishing Brooks' identify, accusing the publication of "doxing" him.

On June 2nd, Twitter user Caroline Orr posted a Twitter thread condemning Facebook for assisting The Daily Beast in their investigation (shown below).

That day, Brooks created a GoFundMe^[10] campaign titled "Shawn Brooks Legal Action Fund" (shown below).

"I'm looking at my options for possible legal action against anyone who was associated in publishing that inaccurate trash article about me, misquoting me and accusing me of being the creator of the Speaker Pelosi video that went viral."

Also on June 2nd, the Twitter account @sportsgurufsr^[11] claiming to be run by Brooks stated that much of the article as "made up" by the author (shown below).

Meanwhile, others noted that the blog BoingBoing uploaded a slowed-down video of Donald Trump which one user titled as "Drunk Trump" back in April 2016 (shown below).^[9]