Hold your tears for Scott Baio, the young actor of Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi fame. While you might have read that he died in a plane crash, he didn’t. The fake news site Daily USA Update described his death in an article datelined June 1.
The next day, Baio posted this photo on Twitter, flexing his bicep in support of American troops as part of a USO campaign called Flex4Forces.
“Scott Baio, 56, was killed when the single-engine Cessna he was in crashed into the side of a hill in Louisiana,” the article said. “Baio was headed to Mar-A-Lago to barbecue shrimp and play gold with President Trump.”
The attentive reader will notice the likely typo of “gold” in place of “golf.”
The error, along with the rest of the article, showed up in a May 29 post on a similarly fake news website. The rumor-monitoring website Snopes declared that false the same day. This is not the first time Baio has been prematurely declared dead. A 1997 hoax said he had died in a car accident.
We rate the Daily USA Update headline that Scott Baio is dead Pants on Fire!