Internet users have been telling a funny story for several years about an elderly couple in which the husband was so unwilling to talk to his wife that he pretended to be deaf for many years. We have verified the accuracy of such publications.

Usually on the Internet this story is told something like this. Dorothy Dawson, 80, and her supposedly deaf husband Barry have been together for more than six decades. To communicate with her husband, the woman even learned sign language, but then the man began to have vision problems. Married life came to an end when Dorothy found out that her husband was actually pretending to be disabled, just to avoid listening to his wife’s “chatter.” She found out about this after accidentally watching a YouTube video of Barry singing karaoke.

Publications dedicated to the Dawson couple can be found in several enough large publics on VKontakte, the authors of some publications even specify that the couple lived in Manchester, England. Tale of the Dawsons posted and Facebook users, including the former CEO of the Kommersant publishing house and the owner of the Vedomosti newspaper Demyan Kudryavtsev. Posts with similar content (often with the same photos) can be found in Twitter And "Yandex.Zene". In 2019, a story about the Dawsons even came out on Public Television of Russia.

It was in the spring of 2019 that the first reports of a high-profile divorce proceeding appeared on social networks and the media. Apparently, the primary source of this news is the World News Daily Report website, where the corresponding note was published March 7. It is accompanied by the same photograph as almost all posts on 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 the state of Connecticut in the USA, and not in the UK, but otherwise the similarity is absolute. World News Daily Report also quotes lawyer Barry Dawson as saying: “If he hadn't pretended to be deaf, they would have divorced 60 years ago. In a way, he did it for her and 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 largest resources in the world that publishes fictitious news. In the disclaimer, posted The Canadian publication's website states: "All characters appearing in the material on this site (even if they resemble real people) are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or borderline, is an absolute miracle." We have previously looked at other World News Daily Report publications that went viral, for example, about a woman who gave birth at the age of 101 Italian and about American, arrested for making 27,000 calls to her ex.

How found out fact-checking project Snopes, the role of the Dawsons in the photo is a real married couple from Florida. In 2016, 88-year-old Lucille Handelsman filed to divorce her husband Burt, a successful real estate entrepreneur. By that time, the Handelsmans had been married for 67 years.