FACT CHECK: Did This Man Die In A Car Crash 2 Weeks After Claiming He Had An Affair With Barack Obama?

A video shared on Facebook purportedly shows a man who died two weeks after claiming that he had an affair with former President Barack Obama.

Verdict: False

The man was still alive as of December 2021.

Fact Check:

The Facebook video appears to originate from a since-deleted TikTok video and shows a man speaking at a podium. The man makes claims that then-Illinois State Sen. Obama ingested cocaine and had sexual relations with him on Nov. 6 and 7, 1999. Text over the video reads: “This man was killed in a car ‘accident’ 2 weeks after this.”

Check Your Fact found that the video clip shows a man named Larry Sinclair speaking during a 2008 press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Footage of the full press conference on YouTube shows Sinclair’s self-described attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley stating that the National Press Club had rented the space to his client but did not condone his views, support them, or have anything to do with his remarks.

Sinclair’s remarks about his relationship with Obama were unsubstantiated, according to 2008 articles by Politico and Wired. Sinclair also did not die in a car accident two weeks after making those claims. He published a book in 2009, after he made the comments during the press conference, entitled, “Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies and Murder” which detailed his allegations about the then-president.

Furthermore, Sinclair ran for mayor of Cocoa, Florida, in 2018, finishing in third place with less than 30 percent of the vote, Florida Today reported. He has also been active on Twitter as recently as Dec. 23, 2021. (RELATED: Does This Photo Show Barack Obama With Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan?)

A wider internet search found no record of Sinclair being involved in a fatal car crash in 2008. The claim that Sinclair died has been circulating online since at least 2008, when a blog corrected the baseless claim that he had been found murdered.

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