Pizzagate conspiracy theory

• 1. Introduction

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  Pizzagate is the name of a false conspiracy theory that fixed on Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. On the 4th of December 2016, a man arrived at the restaurant with a rifle and fired it inside. He had come to investigate a crime that never happened. The episode showed how far an invented story can travel, from a screen into a room full of real people. This documentary follows the rumor from its first appearance to its later lives. How did it begin, and who pushed it in front of millions of readers? What did the people running ordinary businesses endure? And why did a story that was thoroughly debunked keep coming back in new forms?

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• 2. A Rumor Takes Shape

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  In March 2016, hackers used a spear-phishing attack to break into the personal email account of John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. WikiLeaks published his messages in the autumn of that year. Readers soon began insisting that the emails hid code words for pedophilia and human trafficking. They claimed the code linked Democratic officials and several American restaurants to a child sex ring. Comet Ping Pong, they said, was a meeting ground for Satanic ritual abuse. None of it was true.

  On the 30th of October 2016, a Twitter account that posted white supremacist material pushed the story into wider view. The account claimed to be run by a Jewish lawyer in New York. It declared that the New York City Police Department had found a pedophilia ring tied to Democrats while searching through the emails of Anthony Weiner. That claim was false as well. The label Pizzagate borrowed its ending from the Watergate scandal.

  Fake news websites then took over. Your News Wire ran the story first, citing a 4chan post from earlier in the year. Pro-Trump sites repeated it, and SubjectPolitics.com added a claim that the NYPD had raided property belonging to Clinton. The Conservative Daily Post went further, with a headline saying the Federal Bureau of Investigation had confirmed the theory. Each hop made the rumor look more official than the one before. A single Reddit post, only days before the election, would carry it far beyond these fringe sites.

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• 3. Online Amplifiers

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  The BBC traced the story's jump into the mainstream internet to a Reddit user who posted a Pizzagate evidence document several days before the 2016 presidential election. The post claimed that people tied to the pizzeria joked about sex with minors. It also said the artists working with the business made cultish imagery of beheadings and blood. Reddit removed it at some point between the 4th and the 21st of November.

  InfoWars, Planet Free Will and The Vigilant Citizen picked up the story. Alt-right activists Mike Cernovich, Brittany Pettibone and Jack Posobiec promoted it. So did David Seaman, a former writer for TheStreet.com, and Ben Swann, an anchor at CBS46. Basketball player Andrew Bogut helped too, as did Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson and the German edition of The Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper associated with Falun Gong. On the 30th of December, while Bogut recovered from a knee injury, members of the /r/The Donald community on Reddit promoted a false theory that his injury was connected to his support for Pizzagate.

  Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University, studied the Twitter traffic. He found that a disproportionate number of tweets about Pizzagate came from the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam. Some of the most frequent retweeters were bots.

  Members of /r/The_Donald created the /r/pizzagate subreddit to develop the theory further. Reddit banned it on the 23rd of November 2016, after users posted personal details of people connected to the supposed plot. That broke the site's anti-doxing policy, and the company said, "We don't want witchhunts on our site". The community moved to v/pizzagate on Voat, a now-defunct Reddit clone built for far-right content. Some promoters, including David Seaman and Michael G. Flynn, the son of Michael Flynn, stretched the idea into a larger plot called Pedogate. It imagined a satanic cabal of elites from the New World Order running child trafficking rings around the world.

  Turkey picked the story up as well. Pro-government newspapers supportive of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, including Sabah, A Haber, Yeni Şafak, Akşam and Star, reported the allegations. Images from the deleted subreddit circulated on Ekşi Sözlük and on HaberSelf, a viral network where anyone can post, and the state-controlled press reprinted them in full. Efe Sozeri, a columnist for The Daily Dot, suggested that Turkish government sources pushed the story to distract from a child abuse scandal in their own country in March 2016. In North Carolina, meanwhile, one reader of this material was about to take it literally.

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• 4. A Man With a Rifle

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  Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old from Salisbury, North Carolina, fired three shots from an AR-15-style rifle inside Comet Ping Pong. The bullets struck the restaurant's walls, a desk and a door. He told police he had read online that the pizzeria was holding child sex slaves, and he wanted to see for himself. In his own mind he was the hero of the story, a rescuer of children.

  He had tried to bring others along. According to court documents, three days before the attack he urged friends to watch a YouTube video about the conspiracy. When officers surrounded the restaurant, he surrendered and was arrested without incident.

  Welch later gave an interview to The New York Times. He said he regretted how he had handled the situation, yet he did not dismiss the theory, and he rejected the description of it as "fake news". Some conspiracy believers offered their own explanation. They speculated that the shooting had been staged to discredit their investigations.

  On the 13th of December 2016, Welch was charged with interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense, a federal crime. A grand jury then returned an indictment adding assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during a crime. On the 24th of March 2017, under a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to the federal charge and to the local District of Columbia charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. He also agreed to pay $5,744.33 for damage to the restaurant.

  U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, sentenced him to four years in prison on the 22nd of June 2017. At the hearing, Welch apologized and said he had been "foolish and reckless". He was transferred to a Community Corrections Center on the 3rd of March 2020 and released on the 28th of May.

  On the 4th of January 2025, eight years after the shooting, two police officers from Kannapolis, North Carolina, stopped a vehicle in which Welch was a passenger. They were acting on an outstanding warrant for a felony probation violation. When they tried to arrest him, he pulled out a gun and refused orders to drop it. The officers shot him, and he died two days later.

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• 5. Businesses Under Siege

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  James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, told The New York Times: "From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we've come under constant assault. I've done nothing for days but try to clean this up and protect my staff and friends from being terrorized." The restaurant received hundreds of threats from believers, and Alefantis himself received death threats.

  Believers combed through his Instagram account and presented its photos as proof. Many of the pictured people were friends and family who had liked the restaurant's Facebook page. Other images came from unrelated websites and were passed off as his. Yelp locked the restaurant's page, saying the reviews were driven more by the news coverage than by real customer experiences.

  Bands that had played at the pizzeria were dragged in. Amanda Kleinman of the band Heavy Breathing deleted her Twitter account after comments tied her and her group to the theory. Another band, Sex Stains, closed the comments on its YouTube videos and addressed the controversy in their descriptions. The artist Arrington de Dionyso had painted a mural at the pizzeria that was covered over years earlier. He described the harassment against him in detail and called it "a very deliberate assault, which will eventually be a coordinated assault on all forms of free expression." Some observers compared the affair to the Gamergate harassment campaign.

  Neighbors suffered too. Besta Pizza, three doors down from Comet, drew a high volume of menacing phone calls, including death threats. So did the Little Red Fox cafe, the bookstore Politics and Prose, and the French bistro Terasol, which also faced online harassment. The co-owners of Little Red Fox and Terasol filed police reports. In Brooklyn, the restaurant Roberta's received harassing calls, and one caller told an employee she was "going to bleed and be tortured". A since-removed YouTube video had used images from its social media accounts, and others spread the line "Clinton family loves Roberta's". In Austin, Texas, East Side Pies had a delivery truck vandalized with an epithet. Online harassers also invented ties between that restaurant, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Illuminati. The FBI investigated Pizzagate-related threats in March 2017, as part of a probe into possible Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

  The threats did not stop with the shooting. Yusif Lee Jones, a 52-year-old man from Shreveport, Louisiana, phoned Besta Pizza three days after Welch's attack. He said he wanted to "save the kids" and "finish what the other guy didn't". On the 12th of January 2017, he pleaded guilty in federal court in the Western District of Louisiana.

  The pattern surfaced overseas, too. In 2018, the Scottish owner of a vaping business in Portsmouth, England, faced what the Sunday Times called a "xenophobic campaign". It lasted six months. The owner, Mr Cheape, saw 15 to 20 screenshots a day about himself, his partner and his shop. The posts described a paedophile grooming operation and suggested children were being held in the basement. The main culprit, Oliver Redmond, was prosecuted and sentenced to five months in prison. Judge William Mousley QC also imposed a three-year restraining order.

  Comet Ping Pong itself was hit again on the 25th of January 2019, when someone started a fire in one of its backrooms. Employees quickly put it out, and nobody was injured. The arsonist fled but was arrested a few days later while climbing a fence at the Washington Monument, identified through security footage. He had posted a video referencing QAnon before the fire. On the 26th of April 2020, he was sentenced to four years in prison.

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• 6. Evidence and Belief

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  On the 10th of December 2016, The New York Times published an analysis of the theory's claims, and they came apart one by one. Believers had linked Comet Ping Pong to Satanism and pedophilia through similarities between company logos and certain symbols. The Times noted that similar shapes appeared in the logos of unrelated companies such as AOL, Time Warner and MSN. Believers also claimed an underground network ran beneath the pizzeria. The restaurant has no basement, and the photo offered as proof had been taken in another facility.

  A supposed picture of Alefantis in a T-shirt endorsing pedophilia showed a different person. The shirt carried the words "J' ❤ L'Enfant", a nod to the L'Enfant Cafe-Bar in Washington, whose owner was the man pictured. That cafe takes its name from Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who designed much of the city's layout. Another claim said John and Tony Podesta had kidnapped Madeleine McCann in 2007, based on police sketches. The two sketches actually showed the same suspect, drawn from the accounts of two eyewitnesses who described someone "aged between 20 and 40". In 2007, Tony Podesta was 64 and John Podesta was 58.

  Much of the so-called evidence had been lifted from other places and made to look relevant. Photos of the children of friends and family of the pizzeria's staff were taken from Instagram and described as pictures of victims. Snopes.com and The New York Times both judged the theory false after detailed investigation. Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other outlets debunked it too. The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia called the matter "fictitious". No alleged victims have come forward, and no physical evidence has been found.

  The debunking did not slow the hashtag. More than one million messages used #Pizzagate on Twitter in November 2016. Stefanie MacWilliams wrote an article promoting the theory on Planet Free Will, and the Toronto Star reported her saying, "I really have no regrets and it's honestly really grown our audience".

  Polls showed how far the belief reached. On the 6th and the 7th of December 2016, Public Policy Polling asked 1,224 registered voters whether Clinton was connected to a child sex ring run from a pizzeria. Nine percent said yes, 72% said no, and 19% were not sure. From the 17th to the 20th of December, an Economist/YouGov poll asked about the claim that leaked Clinton campaign emails discussed pedophilia and human trafficking. Among Clinton voters, 17% called it true and 82% called it not true. Among Trump voters, 46% called it true and 53% called it not true.

  The academic Roger Lancaster compared Pizzagate to the Satanic panic of the 1980s, when hundreds of daycare workers were falsely accused of abusing children.

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• 7. Reckonings

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  On the 2nd of November 2016, Michael Flynn, then a close supporter of Donald Trump and later his National Security Advisor, tweeted a link to a story full of unfounded accusations. He introduced it with the words "NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails" and added "MUST READ!" Over 9,000 people shared the tweet. Days earlier he had posted other conspiratorial material alleging that John Podesta drank human blood in Satanic rituals. Politico said that claim soon morphed into the Pizzagate theory. Flynn deleted the tweet sometime between the 12th and the 13th of December.

  On the 27th of November, James Alefantis told NPR that the theory was "an insanely complicated, made-up, fictional lie-based story" and a "coordinated political attack". The columnist Daniel Ruth wrote that the allegations had been "repeatedly debunked, disproved, and dismissed".

  After the shooting, Alex Jones of InfoWars backed away from the idea that the Washington pizzeria sat at the center of the plot. On the 4th of December, InfoWars uploaded a YouTube video tying Pizzagate to the death of a sex-worker-rights activist on the 13th of November. The video falsely claimed she had been investigating a link between the Clinton Foundation and human trafficking in Haiti, and speculated she had been murdered. Her former employer, family and friends said her death was a suicide and that she had not been investigating the Clinton Foundation. By the 14th of December, InfoWars had removed two of its three Pizzagate videos.

  On the 6th of December, Michael Flynn Jr., the elder Flynn's son and a member of Trump's transition team, tweeted: "Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many 'coincidences' tied to it." He was forced out of the transition team that same day. Spokesman Jason Miller gave no reason, but The New York Times reported that other officials confirmed the tweet was the cause.

  On the 8th of December, Clinton spoke about the danger of fake news websites. She said that "the epidemic of malicious fake news and fake propaganda that flooded social media over the past year" had shown that "so-called fake news can have real-world consequences".

  In February 2017, lawyers for Alefantis sent Jones a letter demanding an apology and a retraction. Under Texas law, he had a month to comply or face a libel suit. In March 2017, Jones apologized, saying that to his knowledge neither Alefantis nor Comet Ping Pong had been involved in any human trafficking. InfoWars posted a correction on its website. Jones said he regretted any negative impact his commentaries may have had on the restaurant or its employees. He added a hope that anyone else commenting on Pizzagate would do the same.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  QAnon, which emerged in 2017, absorbed Pizzagate as one of its pillars. Media outlets described QAnon as "Pizzagate on steroids" and a "big-budget sequel" to Pizzagate. It widened the child trafficking story into a worldwide conspiracy. It also added new claims. In its version, the abuse belonged to Satanic rituals, and abusers killed children to harvest adrenochrome from their blood. Believers said the substance worked as a drug or as an elixir for staying young.

  In 2018, a related story called Frazzledrip appeared. It claimed that an extreme snuff film had been recovered from Anthony Weiner's stolen laptop and was circulating on the dark web. The file supposedly sat in a folder labeled "life insurance" and showed Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin killing a young girl in a ritual. Snopes found that some of the purported frames came from a YouTube video first posted on April Fools' Day 2018. A photo said to show Abedin in a mask had been taken from the website of a Washington Indian restaurant and showed that restaurant's owner. Hundreds of YouTube videos promoted the claims, and QAnon groups were still circulating them internationally in 2020.

  That year, Pizzagate itself found a new audience. As QAnon grew into an international phenomenon, videos and posts about Pizzagate in Italy, Brazil, Turkey and other countries each reached millions of views. The new wave was less partisan and less American. Most of the promoters of the #PizzaGate hashtag on TikTok, many of them teenagers, were not right-wing, and they supported the Black Lives Matter movement. The focus shifted from Clinton to an alleged global elite of child sex-traffickers, said to include politicians, powerful businesspeople and celebrities.

  Justin Bieber's 2020 song "Yummy" was falsely alleged to be about the theory. The Venezuelan YouTuber DrossRotzank made a video about Bieber's music video and its supposed references to Pizzagate. It drew 3 million views in two days and made Pizzagate a trending topic on Spanish-language Twitter. Believers also read a coded admission into an Instagram Live video, in which Bieber touched his hat after someone in the chat asked him to if he was a victim. Nothing suggests he saw that comment.

  In April 2020, a former Hollywood stuntman released a documentary promoting the theory, Out of Shadows, on YouTube. TikTok users spread both the film and the Bieber rumor until the company banned the #PizzaGate hashtag. The New York Times reported in June 2020 that posts with the hashtag had been viewed more than 82 million times in recent months, and Google searches rose as well. According to CrowdTangle data, comments, likes and shares of Pizzagate in the first week of June passed 800,000 on Facebook and neared 600,000 on Instagram. In the first week of December 2016, the figures had been 512,000 on Facebook and 93,000 on Instagram. From the start of 2017 through January 2020, weekly totals on both platforms averaged under 20,000.

  In August 2020, Facebook temporarily suspended the "#savethechildren" hashtag when it was used to promote parts of Pizzagate and QAnon. The misuse drew protests from the unrelated charity Save the Children. The theory surged again in 2026, during the release of the Epstein files.

  The story has also become material for fiction. The Pizzagate Massacre, a dark satire originally titled Duncan, took inspiration from the theory and from Edgar Maddison Welch's shooting at Comet Ping Pong. It reached video on demand in November 2021.

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