Stand up for the facts!

Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy.
We need your help.

More Info

I would like to contribute

Bloggers

stated on February 9, 2020 in a blog post:

Quotes actor Will Smith as saying: “I’m not afraid to say that Trump and his supporters are ba…”

Will Smith listens to a question at a press conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Aug. 7, 2016. (AP/Schreck)

By Bill McCarthy February 25, 2020

Made-up Will Smith quote resurfaces on pro-Trump blog site

If Your Time is short

The headline quote attributed to Will Smith is both incomplete and made-up.

See the sources for this fact-check

A headline generating interest on social media quotes actor Will Smith as saying, "I’m not afraid to say that Trump and his supporters are ba…"

The quote isn’t just incomplete. It’s also entirely made-up.

The headline appears in a Feb. 9 story on Trump Train Pro News, a website we’ve fact-checked for recycling bogus quotes about President Donald Trump before.

Posts sharing the headline were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

While the headline broadcasts a fake Smith quote, the text of the Trump Train Pro News story is a slightly altered representation of criticisms Smith lobbed at then-candidate Trump in 2016.

The Trump Train Pro News story lifts almost verbatim from an authentic news report published Aug. 3, 2016, by news.com.au, an Australian news outlet. The report features comments Smith made about Trump while promoting "Suicide Squad," a movie about supervillains.

The quotes Smith gave to news.com.au made headlines in mainstream British and U.S. news outlets as well, including the Guardian, Time, the Hill and the Washington Post.

According to the report, Smith said he hoped Trump wouldn’t win the 2016 election and condemned what he called a "separatist non-inclusive xenophobic, racist wave that is sweeping the globe." He said he had no tolerance for Trump’s comments about women and wondered why they didn’t seem to diminish Trump’s support.

Facebook posts

stated on November 13, 2024 in a Facebook post

“Elon Musk permanently bans Robert De Niro from X, declares ‘no room for his woke presence.’”

"For a man to be able to publicly refer to a woman as a fat pig, that makes me teary. And for people to applaud, that is absolutely f------ insanity to me," Smith told news.com.au.

In the Trump Train Pro News story, that same quote — and others from Smith’s news.com.au interview — appears as though it was filtered through a thesaurus machine. The Trump Train Pro News version of Smith’s quote about Trump’s comments on women reads:

"Fоr a man tо hаvе the аbіlіtу tо ѕtrаіghtfоrwаrdlу intimate a wоmаn as a fаt ріg, thаt mаkеѕ me mіѕеrаblе. Lіkеwіѕе, fоr реорlе tо endorsement, thаt is аbѕоlutеlу f------frаntісnеѕѕ tо me."

We found no record that Smith made the statement spotlighted in the Trump Train Pro News headline, which isn’t referenced in the body of its story. Other fact-checkers debunked the same false headline when it appeared on another site.

Smith was critical of Trump throughout the promotional tour for the August 2016 film.

"As painful as it is to hear Donald Trump talk, and as embarrassing it is as an American to hear him talk, I think it’s good," he said during another press event. "We get to hear it, we get to know who people are, and now we get to cleanse it out of our country."

The actor made similar remarks about "cleansing" racism from the United States during a "Tonight Show" interview that same month.

But there’s no proof that he said, "I’m not afraid to say that Trump and his supporters are ba…"

We rate this statement False.