How did fact‑checking organizations verify employment claims in the Pretti case?
Executive summary
Fact‑checking organizations debunked viral claims that Alex Pretti had been fired from a hospital by tracing the story’s origin to a fabricated website, checking payroll and employment records presented on social platforms, contacting institutions named in the false reports, and corroborating Pretti’s actual employer through contemporaneous reporting and official statements; those checks found no evidence he worked at the purported “Lakeshore Medical Center” or that the quoted doctor existed, and showed he was identified in reporting as a Minneapolis VA ICU nurse [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Tracking the source: fabricated report and viral posts
Fact‑checkers began by identifying where the allegation originated — a phony article on a site called Buzzreport247 that claimed a Dr. Elena Vasquez at “Lakeshore Medical Center” said Pretti had been fired — and noted the article’s factual errors and absence of corroboration, a classic red flag for disinformation investigators [1] [2] [3].
2. Institutional checks: calling the hospital and searching records
Verifiers searched for any institutional footprint of the named hospital and physician and found no evidence of a Lakeshore Medical Center in the U.S. tied to the claim and no record of a Dr. Elena Vasquez affiliated with such a facility, leading organizations to conclude the named sources were fabricated [1] [4] [2].
3. Examining the purported payroll screenshots and public records
Screenshots of what looked like federal payroll records circulated on X and other platforms; fact‑checkers treated those as unverified evidence, repeatedly flagging that no official confirmation had been provided by DHS or other agencies and that screenshots alone were insufficient to prove employment [5] [2].
4. Cross‑referencing credible reporting and colleagues’ accounts
Reporters and fact‑checkers cross‑checked contemporaneous mainstream reporting and statements from colleagues, which consistently identified Pretti as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System and described his years of service there, a stronger evidentiary basis than the anonymous website story [2] [3].
5. Applying verification best practices and highlighting limits
Outlets explicitly applied standard verification techniques — source tracing, institutional contact, document skepticism, and corroboration with reliable reporting — guided by general fact‑checking principles about evidence types (data, expert quotes, official records) and noting where claims remained unproven because agencies had not issued employment confirmations [6] [5] [1].
6. Alternative narratives, motives and the role of fabricated sources
Fact‑checkers presented alternative explanations for the viral narrative — that bad actors used a fabricated local‑sounding hospital and a named doctor to lend credibility — and flagged a likely motive: to smear the victim’s reputation amid a high‑emotion national story, while cautioning readers that absence of official DHS employment confirmation at the time left some social‑media claims technically unverified until corroborated by reliable institutional records [1] [2] [5].
7. Conclusion and evidentiary standing
The cumulative verification — debunking the Buzzreport247 article, failing to find the named hospital or physician, treating social screenshots as unproven, and corroborating mainstream reporting that Pretti worked at the Minneapolis VA — led fact‑checking organizations to conclude the firing allegations were false or unsubstantiated, while transparently noting where primary official confirmation was lacking [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].