Instagram post misrepresents photo to falsely connect beaten woman to George Floyd

Note: This story includes a description of a rape incident.

A social media post claims to show a woman beaten by George Floyd, the man whose 2020 killing inspired nationwide social justice demonstrations.

Floyd died May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes. He was 46. Former officer Derek Chauvin, 47, was convicted of Floyd’s murder.

This post, like others we have checked, seeks to challenge the notion that Floyd was a victim.

"Let me introduce you to Araceli Hernandez. … She was a girl that was kidnapped by George Floyd and brutally beaten during a home invasion! George and his accomplices search her apartment for drugs," read the text in the Dec. 10 Instagram video.

The Instagram post’s caption included the hashtags "#georgefloyd" and "#blm," referencing the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 sparked by Floyd’s death.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

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stated on October 28, 2024 in in social media posts

"Nicki Minaj just endorsed Donald Trump for President.”

In 2020, we fact-checked a similar post that also used Sicignano’s photo but identified the woman by another name: Aracely Henriquez. Both are wrong.

These posts conflate two unrelated events and exaggerated the charge against Floyd.

In 2007, Floyd was arrested in Houston and charged with aggravated robbery. He and five other men broke into the apartment of a woman named Aracely Henriquez (not Hernandez, as the most recent post says). According to the criminal complaint, Henriquez accused Floyd of placing a pistol against her abdomen and forcing his way into her home. 

The men searched her home, demanding to know where the drugs and money were stored. They took some of her jewelry and her phone. Another complainant, Angel Negrete, who was with Henriquez during the robbery, said he remembered seeing Floyd going through the kitchen cabinets. The complaint didn’t mention kidnapping or brutal assault. 

But the woman in the Instagram post photo is not Henriquez. A reverse-image search of the photo led to 2018 news articles about a woman named Andrea Sicignano who shared her account of being assaulted and raped in Madrid. 

Sicignano’s Facebook post detailing the incident is now unavailable, but we found an archived copy of the Dec. 19, 2018, post. She did not mention Floyd; she said the man who assaulted her was detained and awaiting trial.

Floyd spent most of his life in Houston, where he was arrested nine times. None of the charges were for kidnapping, assault or rape.

We rate the claim that this photo shows Araceli Hernandez who "was kidnapped by George Floyd and brutally beaten during a home invasion" False.