Fact Check

Was an Alabama Man Caught Having Sex with a Pig in a Walmart Bathroom?

There are more embarrassing things to be arrested over, but not many.

Published July 28, 2015

Claim:
An Alabama man named Marvin Halbert was caught having sex with a pig in a Walmart bathroom.

On 27 July 2015, the web site Now8News published an article titled "Alabama Man Caught Having Sex with Pig in WalMart Bathroom," which reported that:

Marvin Halbert of Birmingham, Alabama is in police custody after Walmart workers found him having “inappropriate relations” with a farm pig in the superstore restroom. Customers reported hearing loud squealing coming from the bathroom in the back area of the store near the layaway department. An eyewitness said her seven-year-old son went in to use the restroom, and came out screaming, “Mommy, mommy is a man in the bathroom holding a pig really close to him!”

Confused, the woman alerted a store clerk and was informed they already had several complaints about noise in the restroom. Raymond Cooper, an employee at the Walmart store, said he was the one that ran in and saved the pig. “When I went into the bathroom, I heard squealing from inside the stall. I told the man to open it but he wouldn’t, so I kicked it in. That crazy ass fool for real was doing a pig. I socked him in the face and grabbed the pig. That fool was out cold.”

However, Now8News (styled to mimic a local television station news web site, like KLAS) was a fake news site that aimed to confuse readers by blending wildly sensational claims like the one above with re-writes of actual news events. The pig sex tale is (of course) false, and the mugshot accompanying the story was of sovereign citizen and former fugitive Edward Eugene Harper.

Kim LaCapria is a former writer for Snopes.

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