Fox News contributor Sara Carter has walked back her entirely fictitious claim about a woman dying after being trampled by a Canadian authority on horseback amid ongoing trucker-led protests.
While the claim wasn’t accurate, the tweet was red-meat for her over 1.3 million conservative Twitter followers, who quickly amplified the baseless death as evidence of Canadian government wrongdoing.
“Reports are the woman trampled by a Canadian horse patrol just died at the hospital ... #Trudeau #FreedomConvoyCanada,” Carter tweeted Friday evening.
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Shortly thereafter, conservatives picked up and amplified the tweet, including former Fox Nation hosts Diamond and Silk and Republican Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
On Saturday morning, attempting to do clean-up, the Fox News contributor admitted her reporting was false.
“The Reports I was given earlier yesterday from sources on the ground that someone may have died at a hospital during the trampling was wrong,” she tweeted.
The Fox News contributor and frequent Sean Hannity enlisted field reporter added that “someone was taken to a hospital with a heart condition - not due to trampling. I want to clarify this again and apologize for any confusion.”
Carter didn’t return The Daily Beast’s Saturday evening request for comment, but the fictitious tweet about the woman dying at the hospital was deleted following the inquiry.
Video clips posted to Twitter show Canadian horseback riding authorities attempting to disperse the crowd of protesting truckers. That action, taken by police officers, left “Freedom Convoy” organizers to claim that their own activists, during the attempted dispersion, were “horse-trampled.”
That “horse-trampled” claim has since received substantial push back by the Ottawa Police, who wrote: “We hear your concern for people on the ground after the horses dispersed a crowd. Anyone who fell got up and walked away. We’re unaware of any injuries.”
Following Carter’s backtracking, Cruz has also since retracted his quote-retweet, writing: “I deleted my retweet about a Canadian protestor being trampled to death because the journalist who first reported it now says it was in error.”
This isn’t the first time Carter has made an outlandish claim and had to backpedal. In March of 2020, the Fox News star deleted a bonkers tweet urging her followers to film nearby hospitals, convinced that people weren’t getting sick in mass numbers and leading to overflowing hospital rooms amid a global pandemic.
