The
murder of Seth Rich occurred on Sunday, July 10, 2016, at 4:20 a.m. in the
Bloomingdale neighborhood of
Washington, D.C. Rich died more than an hour and a half after receiving two gunshot wounds to the back. He was murdered by unknown perpetrators for unknown reasons, but police suspected he had been the victim of an attempted
robbery.
The 27-year-old Rich was an employee of the
Democratic National Committee (DNC), and his murder spawned several right-wing
conspiracy theories, including the false claim that Rich had been involved with the
leaked DNC emails in 2016, contradicted by the law enforcement branches that investigated the murder. It was also contradicted by the July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents for hacking the e-mail accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials and by the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion the leaked DNC emails were part of
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
[5][6][8] Fact-checking websites like
PolitiFact,
Snopes, and
FactCheck.org stated that the theories were false and unfounded.
The New York Times,
Los Angeles Times, and
The Washington Post wrote that the promotion of these conspiracy theories was an example of
fake news.
Rich's parents condemned the conspiracy theorists and said that those individuals were exploiting their son's death for political gain, and their spokesperson called the conspiracy theorists "disgusting sociopaths". They requested a retraction and apology from
Fox News after the network promoted the conspiracy theory,
and sent a
cease and desist letter to the investigator Fox News used. The investigator stated that he had no evidence to back up the claims which Fox News attributed to him. Fox News issued a retraction, but did not apologize or publicly explain what went wrong. In response, the Rich family sued Fox News in March 2018 for having engaged in "extreme and outrageous conduct" by fabricating the story defaming their son and thereby
intentionally inflicting emotional distress on them. The judge initially dismissed the suit in August 2018, but the court of appeals later allowed the case to proceed.
