For several years, Internet users have been telling a funny story about an elderly married couple, in which her husband did not want to talk with his wife so much that he portrayed deafness for many years. We checked the reliability of such publications.

Usually on the Internet this story is told something like this. 80-year-old Dorothy Dawson and her supposedly deaf husband Barry lived together for more than six decades. To communicate with her husband, the woman even learned the language of gestures, but then the man began to have vision problems. Family life came to an end when Dorothy found out that in fact her husband pretended to be disabled, just not to listen to his wife’s “chatter”. She found out about this, accidentally watching YouTube videos with a barry singing in karaoke.

Publications dedicated to Dawson. several enough large public On VKontakte, the authors of some publications even clarify that the married couple lived in English Manchester. The story of Dawsons Placed and Facebook users, including the former general director of the Kommersant Publishing House and the owner of the newspaper Vedomosti Demyan Kudryavtsev. Similar to the content of posts (often with the same photographs) can be found in Twitter And "Yandex.Zen". In 2019, the plot of pre -ups even I went out On "Public Television of Russia".

It was in the spring of 2019 that the first reports of the loud divorce proceedings appeared in social networks and the media. Apparently, the source of this news is the World News Daily Report, where the corresponding note was Published March 7. It is accompanied by the same photograph as almost all posts in social networks on this topic, and its content almost completely coincides with the messages of Internet users. The only difference: the original publication states that the Dawsons lived in Connecticut in the United States, and not in the UK, but otherwise the similarity is absolute. World News Daily Report also cites lawyer Barry Dawson: “If he had not pretended to be deaf, they would have divorced 60 years ago. In a sense, he did it for her for his family. ”

Unfortunately, the media and Internet users when retelling the original publication do not make an important clarification: World News Daily Report is one of the world's largest resources publishing fictional news. In disclaimer, placed The website of the Canadian publication says: “All the heroes appearing in the materials on this site (even if they look like real people) are completely fictitious, and any similarity between them and any people, living, dead or in a borderline state is an absolute miracle.” Earlier, we have already analyzed other World News Daily Report publications, which became viral, for example, about the age of 101 Italian and about American, arrested for 27,000 calls to his former.

How I found out The fact of the Snopes fact, the role of Dawsons in the photograph is a real married couple from Florida. In 2016, 88-year-old Lucille Handelsman Submitted for divorce with his spouse Burt, a successful entrepreneur in the field of real estate. By that time, the Handelsmans lived in a marriage of 67 years.