Nancy Pelosi divorce story is fake

An article making the rounds on Facebook claims Nancy Pelosi’s fourth husband is filing for divorce. It’s as fake today as it was a year ago when it was first published on a website that describes its content as satire. 

"Nancy Pelosi’s 4th Husband Files for Divorce: ‘I Just Can’t Take It Anymore,’" reads the headline on an April 14, 2020, story on a site called Maga20 News.

The article was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The entire article was lifted from a satirical story published in 2019.

The same headline, and the same article, were previously posted on tatersgonnatate.com with this tag: "Pelosi's Satirical Bout with Alcoholism." 

The article includes clues that it is satirical, such as its claim that one of the House speaker’s former husbands is Marsellus Wallace. He was the gang boss character played by Ving Rhames in the movie "Pulp Fiction." 

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said “if every member of Congress had to resign for doing what Matt Gaetz has been accused of, Democrats would have a supermajority.’"

The About Us tab on the taters website says the site "is a subsidiary of the America’s Last Line of Defense network of parody, satire and tomfoolery." PolitiFact has written about that website and its faux-news creator, Christopher Blair.

Though the tatersgonnahate.com story does not have a date of publication attached to it, Lead Stories fact-checked the original article, reporting that it was satire, on March 31, 2019, saying the article had been posted 10 days earlier. 

That’s more than a year before the article we’re checking was posted.

Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a businessman in real estate and venture capital, have been married since 1963. The California Democrat has never divorced. And there is no indication she is divorcing now. A Pelosi spokesman called it "fiction."

An April article claiming that Pelosi’s fourth husband is filing for divorce is a reprint of an article from more than a year earlier from a website that publishes satire.

Pelosi has been married to the same man since 1963 and has never divorced.

We rate the claim False.