Letter announcing President Jimmy Carter’s death on July 23 is fake

A letter that claims to be from the office of former President Jimmy Carter sparked rumors on Tuesday that Carter had died. 

The letter shared by multiple people on X said in part that the 39th U.S. president passed away on July 23 at his home in Plains, Georgia, at age 99. 

THE QUESTION

Is a letter announcing former President Jimmy Carter’s death on July 23 real?

THE SOURCES

THE ANSWER

No, the letter announcing former President Jimmy Carter’s death is not real. 

WHAT WE FOUND

Former President Jimmy Carter is still alive. The letter announcing Carter’s passing is fake, according to its creator and the Carter Center. 

“This is false. There has been no announcement or change,” a spokesperson for the Carter Center told multiple media outlets.

The Carter Center did not respond to our request for comment by the time of publication. But the center's official social media accounts and website did not post anything about the president’s passing.

In their original post, the “ALT” text, or image description, for the fabricated letter says, “President Carter is still alive and in hospice care. This was an experiment to see how gullible people are to sensationalist headlines.”

The post’s creator told VERIFY the “amount of misinformation which spread throughout the weekend surrounding the state of President Biden’s health was maddening,” prompting them to create the fake death announcement. 

“I wanted to prove that many people on X often spread sensationalist news and headlines without actually fact-checking or double checking the source content,” the user told VERIFY.

There are other indications that the letter is fabricated, which some people pointed out in the posts’ comments. The text of the fake letter includes language that Carter’s office would not use in an official death announcement and satirical claims about the former president’s time in office.

For example, the second paragraph of the letter lists “selling the United States out to Panama” and “failing to rescue several hostages from Iran” as some of Carter’s accomplishments.

The fake letter duped conservative commentator Laura Loomer and other prominent figures.

“It appears that the letter saying Jimmy Carter has passed away is fabricated,” Loomer wrote in a follow-up post, adding that she had deleted the letter. She said “people should not post death hoaxes.”

The letter’s creator told VERIFY they do not have “ill will towards President Carter and his family,” and that they “admire him greatly for his service to our nation and efforts to promote democracy around the world.”