Sylvester Stallone Death Hoaxes

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Part of a series on Internet Death Hoaxes. [View Related Entries]

About

Sylvester Stallone Death Hoaxes are fabricated rumors concerning the death of actor and director Sylvester Stallone. These rumors are frequently started on survey scam websites and spread on social media as part of phishing operations.

Origin

The earliest known example of a Sylvester Stallone death hoax was published on June 13th, 2014 by the website Global Associated News.^[3] That day, they published that the actor had been killed in a snowboarding accident in Zermatt, Switzerland.

Spread

On August 25th, 2014, the website Media Fetcher^[1] published an article that stated his death occurred in a car crash in Queensland, Austrailia. The hoax states:

"Actor Sylvester Stallone died in a single vehicle crash between Ipswich and Willowbank in Queensland as confirmed by Royal Queensland Police – August 25, 2014 The accident occurred at approximately 5:30 a.m. (UTC/GMT +10). Sylvester Stallone is believed to have been in the area while on vacation. He was identified by photo ID found at the scene. Alcohol and drugs do not appear to have been a factor in this accident."

Two years later, On September 1st, 2016, another death hoax began spreading around the internet.^[2] In this case, an image (shown below) that resembles footage from CNN shows the actor's picture and the chyron that reads, "Stallone Dead At 69." However, the image is from an article about the death of Stallone's song Sage, who died in 2012.

On February 18th, 2018, Facebook ^[4] user edgardaniel.torrealba.5 published a series of pictures of Stallone, including the actor's headshot and images from Stallone on the set of Creed II, in which his famous character Rocky Balboa is dying of cancer, declaring him dead. He captioned the post, "SO LONG CHAMP Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone died early this morning after his battle with prostate cancer, the actor kept his illness a secret, but in the end he couldn't beat it." The post (shown below, left) received more than 350,000 reactions, 165,000 comments and 2.5 million shares.

The following day, Stallone posted a picture of the hoax on his personal Instagram ^[5] page. Stallone included the caption "Please ignore this stupidity… Alive and well and happy and healthy… Still punching!" Within 24 hours, the post (shown below, right) received more than 438,000 likes.

Several media outlets published stories that debunked the hoax, including Snopes,^[6] BBC,^[7] Fox News, ^[8] EW^[9] and more.