A bizarre story has been circulating on Italian social media over the past couple of days detailing how a drug dealer was allegedly raped by 12 men during a drug-fueled gay sex party.

The story, originally published on the Italian blog telenorbanews24.wordpress.com, has understandably gained a lot of attention online.

According to the site, Antonio Centonze, a ‘well-known drug dealer’ from the Southern Italian city of Lecce, was asked to deliver his ‘goods’ to a private house in his hometown. When he arrived at the location, however, he found 12 men attending a drug-fueled gay sex party. The men reportedly assaulted, robbed and then took turns raping the dealer.

It stated that following the ordeal, Centonze was forced to go to the local hospital ‘Vito Fazzi’ to seek medical care. As if this wasn’t bad enough, when he arrived at the A&E department, he was confronted by police who found him in possession of cocaine and arrested him. Only then did he inform the police about what had happened. They promptly raided the apartment where the sex party was still happening and arrested the 12 men.

Sounds pretty crazy right? Well, it turns out the entire story was 100% fabricated.

The Facts

The story was recently picked up by an Italian news blog Salento Metropoli (a legit one this time) which exposed the events as fake news in a recent post.

As pointed out by Salento Metropoli, many elements in the story don’t add up. Upon investigation, it turns out that all the events of the story never actually took place. The 12 mugshots of the assaulters were found randomly online.

On top of this, the site hosting the story is a free WordPress blog claiming to be part of the Italian multimedia group “TeleNorba”. It’s extremely unlikely that a relatively big multimedia group would resort to an unknown free WordPress blog to report, despite a replica of the group logo being plastered all over the blog (often covering the articles’ texts).

Finally, the cookie policy redirects users to a foreign website which is not affiliated in any way with the Italian multimedia group.

Fake News Propaganda

Looking into other content of the site, most of the other ‘news’ seems to focus on ‘dangerous migrants’ and again seem extremely hard to believe, especially since no other news outlet has reported on any of them and they can’t be fact-checked.

Some of the most recent posts include a Romanian man almost killing a driver for not honking back at him, a migrant attacking a couple of tourists screaming “Allah Akbar”, migrants arriving in Italy via boat with Al Qaeda propaganda. None of these stories cites sources and it’s safe to say they are all false.

It seems pretty obvious whoever is behind the site is trying to push a very specific narrative and agenda, something that has recently become a known phenomenon in Italy.

With the country currently experiencing a ‘migrant crisis’, a rise in homophobic attacks and a far-right Government constantly pushing xenophobic and homophobic messages, extreme right-wing groups seem to often resort to similar sites in order to spread fake news, gather consent and influence the public into believing that minorities are a threat to Italy.