Celebrity death rumors happen all the time, but this is by far the strangest. Former porn star Sasha Grey had to go on Twitter to tell fans that she was not killed by the Ukrainian military.
The rumor began on a site called Dvach, which is an Eastern European imageboard site similar to 4Chan. According to Mediate, a propaganda story posted there claimed that a Russian nurse named “Sasha Serova” was captured and “humiliated” by the Ukrainian military, even chopping her body up with an ax. The post included a picture of Grey and the last name of the woman does translate to “gray” in Russian.
The Moscow Times reports that the post went viral, scoring 3,500 likes in one day.
Obviously, Grey is not dead. She posted on Twitter that, while she loves her Russian fans, propaganda like that “takes it too far.”
As Mediate notes, propaganda posts like the one that sparked the rumor of Grey’s death are spread to see if Russians would believe such stories about Ukrainians. And the Moscow Times points out that Grey has been accused of supporting Ukraine, since she told citizens there to “stay strong” during protests in December 2013.
Here’s Grey’s tweets:
image courtesy of INFevents.com