Q: Did Jennifer Lawrence link 9/11 with the election of President Trump?
A: No. There is no record of the actress ever saying the quote attributed to her.
FULL ANSWER
A Facebook meme that implicitly attributes a nonsensical quote to Jennifer Lawrence that links 9/11 with the election of President Donald Trump has garnered more than 11,000 shares in recent days.
But we could find no record of the actress ever making the statement in the photo, uploaded Sept. 14 to a Facebook page called “Capitalism.”
“It makes me sad on 9/11,” the meme reads, “to know that the Twin Towers and all the people inside them would still be here if Trump had not stolen the election.”
The photo cites no interview or source for the statement, and there is no evidence Lawrence even suggested a connection between Trump’s win and the terrorist attacks that took place 15 years prior to his election — a bizarre idea that defies logic and common sense.
Some commenters on Facebook seemed to realize that the quote didn’t pass muster. One woman remarked, “It’s a meme, people on FB should realize by now not to believe everything you see.”
But throughout the thousands of comments left on the photo were many betraying users’ apparent belief in the quote.
“Ignorance at it’s worst. This poor child must not be able to read, or think. Where do these crazy ideas come from??” one woman commented. Another replied, “Liberal schools!”
Lawrence has been a critic of Trump: In a 2017 interview with Oprah Winfrey, she suggested that she would throw a martini in his face if she ever met him.
She also has expressed her dismay with his election in other interviews, too.
“When Donald Trump got elected, my head exploded,” Lawrence said (at the 5:30-minute mark) during an event in New York City earlier this year. “I felt helpless, I felt scared, I felt devastated. And I found that the only thing that I could actually do is educate myself.”
Naming issues such as the environment, public education, health care and immigration, she added: “Everything that I care about is all affected by corruption and it doesn’t actually matter who we have in office, these problems are going to exist either way — that is what we have to fix. We have to have a fair democracy where these corporations and billionaires are not able to buy votes from the people that we the American people elect into office.”
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on the social media network.
Sources
Facebook Live interview with Jennifer Lawrence. The Wing (Soho). Facebook. 23 Feb 2018.
Winfrey, Oprah. “The Jennifer Lawrence Interview, by Oprah Winfrey.” The Hollywood Reporter. 6 December 2017.
FactCheck.org Rating: 