Fabricated story stars Mark Wahlberg denouncing ‘blood drinking pedophiles’

An image of actor Mark Wahlberg standing at a microphone in front of a crucifix appears below what looks like a July 12 news headline.

"Mark Wahlberg: Hollywood pedophiles have ‘nowhere left to hide,’" the headline says. 

An Instagram post sharing a screenshot of this headline was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The blog that published that headline — and that has previously published fabricated news stories — has since deleted the post.

But an archived version of the story shows it said Wahlberg "told hundreds of people at a Sunday school meeting in Los Angeles that a small yet powerful group of Hollywood insiders had declared war on the ‘evil’ entertainment industry elite who traffic in children, and ‘Hollywood pedophiles have nowhere left to hide.’" 

"We are hunting these evil sons of b—- down and taking them out, one blood drinking pedophile at a time," the post quotes Wahlberg as saying.

We found no evidence to support these quotes or claims. The photo in the post is authentic, but it shows Wahlberg in Chicago in 2017, when he joined a press conference at the Archdiocese of Chicago headquarters "to help the church’s renewed effort to galvanize young adults toward their faith," the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

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"I think the most important thing for me to do, as a person who needed guidance and who needed to refocus his faith, was to be an example," Wahlberg said at the press conference, during which he credited his Catholic faith with helping get his life on track.

PolitiFact didn’t immediately hear back from Wahlberg about the claims in the post, but Lead Stories reported that a representative for the actor said "this story is completely false." 

That’s what we rate it: False.