Claim: Actress Natalie Portman made a $50 million donation to a hospital in Israel.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, March 2011]
Oscar Winner, Natalie Portman, makes major donation to Hadassah Hospital.
Hadassah Hospital received a $50 million donation last week from a woman who was born there - famed actress Natalie Portman.
Portman's donation is earmarked for an improved and expanded emergency trauma center. The Hadassah Women's Zionist movement is behind the project. The expansion will enable three times as many victims to be treated at once.
At a ceremony last week at the Jerusalem Theater, Dr. Kobi Assaf, Hadassah Hospital's director of surgery and shock trauma, said the expansion of the trauma center will save many lives. "One of the most crucial things we can do for trauma patients is treat them quickly," he said. "The new unit is arranged specifically to do that; everything we need to treat them is right here."
Origins: In March 2011, Natalie Portman won an Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for the film Black Swan, an event which prompted the recirculation of a six-year-old rumor that the actress, who was born in
Jerusalem, Israel, had donated $50 million to the Hadassah Medical Center in that city. A representative from a firm that handles publicity for the Hadassah Medical Center confirmed for us that the rumor was false when it was initially spread back in 2005 and is still untrue:
In 2005, a blog mistakenly reported that Natalie Portman had made a $50 million donation to Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now, though this story has been repeated in the past few days.
This story was first misreported exactly six years ago this month when Hadassah announced it had raised $50 million in just two short years from quite a variety of sources for a new center for emergency medicine (which was true). Natalie Portman appeared at the event but did not contribute to the center. For some unknown reason, last week, people began to re-circulate the very old, very wrong version of the story claiming that Portman had made a $50 million donation.
