Online claims that man injured wife mistaking her 'snake socks' for a real snake are fake
Last updated on: 24 July,2021 10:03 am
Photograph of the snake-print tights is commonly used on online retailer websites.
(Reuters) - Social media users are sharing a photograph of a woman wearing snake-print tights and a photo of an injured foot, claiming she was hurt after her husband mistook her leg for a snake in their bed. The story, however, is untrue.
Examples can be seen here:
The text in one post with more than 2,200 shares reads: “The woman wearing these snake skin printed pajamas was sleeping with her foot outside of the blanket and her husband thought it was snake. He ended up breaking her foot with a baseball bat. True story..”
The post shows two photographs, one of a woman’s legs wearing the snakeskin-pattern tights on the left and another of an injured foot on the right.
Reuters used a Google reverse images search to find whether the photographs appeared anywhere else online. By uploading an image or linking to an image, Google can show links to pages where similar or related photographs may have appeared.
The search found that the photograph of the snake-print tights is commonly used on online retailer websites such as Alibaba and Amazon.
Another search also found that the photograph of the injured foot was first posted on Jan. 17, 2016 on a Vietnamese WordPress blog documenting the work of surgical interns.
The injured foot belongs to a 36-year-old male who cut his foot open while helping his family with a cutting machine and was admitted to the general emergency department of People’s Hospital 115 in Ho Chi Minh City, according to a translation. The blog does not discuss what the patient was helping the family with or more details about the machine.
Reuters did not find any credible evidence for the story of the man mistaking his wife’s foot for a snake. Fact checkers Snopes and AFP have also debunked the claim.
Hence, the photographs of the woman wearing snakeskin-pattern tights and the injured foot are unrelated. The story appears to be fabricated.