The overtly sexual content would suggest otherwise. The music acts and the posters promoting same acts are bizarre in their presentation, content, and lyrical focus, but are still promoted as being “for all ages”.
Their menu include a pedophilic symbol, as do the signs and decorations of other neighboring businesses. Websites describing it positively note that there are regularly “unsupervised children running around”. Reviews of the restaurant are bizarrely polarized. The bathrooms in particular have murals exclusively of nude women, as well as a great deal of graffiti relating to sex. It’s also a dive that according to reviews and photos has hidden bathroom doors and creepy murals. John’s brother and business partner Tony Podesta has his birthday party there every year. John Podesta has had campaign fundraisers there for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It has been the venue for dozens of events for the Hillary campaign staff. (A subreddit dedicated to the controversy, r/pizzagate, was created in the interim.) A brief and incomplete summary of the theory espoused in the original post goes as follows:Ĭomet Pizza is a pizza place owned by James Alefantis, who is the former gay boyfriend of David Brock, the CEO of Correct The Record. Clinton.Īlthough the original “Pizzagate” post was deleted at some point between 4 and 21 November 2016, archived versions of it contained what appeared to be the original post in its entirety. Alefantis, 42, who was once in a relationship with David Brock, a provocative former right-wing journalist who became an outspoken advocate for Mrs. “From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we’ve come under constant assault,” said Mr. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims.
While Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. None of this elaborate conspiracy theory was true, as the New York Times noted: It reads, “Selfie at the #TeenTitansGoMovie premiere! Boo-yah!” and the location is tagged as TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California.On 4 November 2016, Reddit user u/DumbScribblyUnctious published a thread titled “Comet Ping Pong – Pizzagate Summary” to subreddit r/The_Donald (a community of Donald Trump supporters), which appears to have touched off a complex and detailed conspiracy theory involving WikiLeaks’ release of e-mails from former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chair John Podesta, child exploitation, and a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. The Oswalt tweet has been edited in order to fabricate the caption and location. Welch told authorities he had been trying to investigate the online conspiracy theory that the eatery was a front for a pedophile ring led by then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ( here ). Some of the posts and comments refer to “Pizzagate”, which stemmed from a fake online report that a Washington DC pizza restaurant was cover for a child sex trafficking ring ( here ). In 2017, a man named Edgar Welch went into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant with an assault rifle loaded with 29 rounds of ammunition, pointed it at an employee and fired shots into a door. He was sentenced to four years in prison. The tweet reads: “Went on a hunt and caught this tasty morsel Boo-yah! – at Comet Ping Pong”. Examples can be seen here and here.