FACT CHECK: Is Jewish hotel mogul James Horton recruiting one thousand women to bear his children and create "the biggest family in the world"?
Claim: Jewish hotel mogul James Horton is recruiting one thousand women to bear his children and create "the biggest family in the world."
Example: [Collected via e-mail, August 2015]
Billionaire paying $10,000 a month for women to have his babies? Surely this can't be real.
Origins: In August 2015, the entertainment web site Link Beef published an article reporting that hotel mogul James Horton was offering to pay one thousand women $10,000 per month each, for life, to bear his children and help him create the world's largest family:
Jewish Hotel mogul James Horton wants to have the biggest family in the world. So much so that he has offered to pay $10,000 each month for life to any woman that has a child with him.
Horton has offered to house 1000 women in one of his 5 star hotels for up to 2 years while he conceives a child with any woman he chooses.
Horton has had over 22,000 entries and has selected around 250 women so far.
Horton has said that he will be selecting women based on their looks from pictures they submit to his website. After the initial selection, the candidates are invited to his mansion in Beverly Hills, where she will then go through an interview process with Horton.
If they pass this test, they go through a medical screening process and tested for any STD’s.
After selection, the lucky lady then moves into his 5 star hotel, where Horton will copulate with all the women until they are pregnant.
There is no truth to the above-displayed story. While Link Beef does not include a readily available disclaimer on their site indicating they are purveyors of fake news, several factors identify this article as fiction:
First, "Jewish Hotel Mogul James Horton" doesn't seem to exist. The only mention of his name on the Internet is connected to the above-quoted article.
Second, the photographs included in the article are not related to "James Horton" nor to the women he has supposedly selected to create the world's biggest family. The first image shows the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills (part of Montage Hotels & Resorts founded in 2002 by Alan Fuerstman) and not a hotel owned by "James Horton":
The second image is a promotional photograph for Wonderbra's Multiplunge bra and not, as claimed by Link Beef, the "250 ladies Horton already selected posed for a photo shoot yesterday":
In addition to deceiving readers with a fake news article, Link Beef also claimed that Horton had set up a web site at the domain BillionaireBaby.org in order to receive applications from prospective female "family members" interesting in bearing his children:
Although it's unclear who owns BillionaireBaby.org or what intent of the web site is (beyond something set up merely to lend credence to a fake news story), it's highly unlikely that anyone submitting photographs to it will get to experience an extended stay at a luxury hotel, a large monetary stipend, and impregnation by a fictional billionaire hotel mogul.
Link Beef has previously published fake stories about a gang member attempting to gold plate his genitals, a "lab-grown" baby, and a castaway being rescued with the help of Google Earth.
Last updated: 17 August 2015
Originally published: 17 August 2015