The Biggest Rumors About The Obama Family

Being in the spotlight always comes with a certain level of scrutiny, but being in the political spotlight means much of it stems from a place of bigotry, prejudice, and hatred. Barack Obama knows this all too well. While some of the rumors that have surrounded him have been lighthearted – like when folks wondered if Obama wears makeup – most have been crafted to hurt and degrade.

From the moment Barack Obama first ran for the White House and all the way up until now, critics (many of them members of the far-right) have tried to weaponize fake news stories against him, his presidency, and his family. Unfortunately, not even the youngest members of the Obama family have been spared. Indeed, for over a decade, they've had to deal with mounting false facts about Barack and Michelle, absurd rumors about the first lady, and even hurtful stories about Malia and Sasha. And while all of the questionable theories have been debunked by reputable sources, haters continue to propagate fake headlines online with malicious intent. Here are all of the biggest Obama family rumors (some benign; many malicious) that have taken hold of the internet through the years.

In addition to questioning Barack Obama's citizenship, numerous conspiracists debated where he was born and most honed in on Kenya. The former president's father does indeed hail from the East African nation, but Obama was not born there. As his birth certificate shows, he was born in Hawaii. However, a fake version of the document, which lists his birthplace as Kenya, began spreading online in 2009 and had people believing otherwise. The fact that Obama's half-brother, Malik (a passionate Donald Trump supporter), tweeted the fake birth certificate only added fuel to the fire. Interestingly, as Reuters noted, the forgery wasn't even a very good one. In one corner, it had a seal from "South Australia" and it also listed Kenya as a republic, which it was not at the time.

Ironically, the "birther" conspiracy really took off after the White House tried to debunk it by posting a copy of the real birth certificate online. Critics called it fake and speculation ran so rampant that the director of Hawai'i's State Department of Health had to actually come out and vouch for its authenticity. It didn't help. Over a decade later, the fake news is still spreading. In 2023, AP had to debunk a resurfaced video from 2010, which was originally posted by a parody YouTube account. In the clip, which many on social media shared as true, Obama's voice was altered to proclaim, "I wasn't born in the United States of America, I come from Kenya."

Barack Obama was raised by a father and stepfather who were Muslim, however, he himself is a practicing Christian. Either way, his beliefs had nothing to do with his qualifications for office and yet, critics tried to misreport and weaponize his religion against him. Stories that Obama was Muslim first appeared in 2004, per Pew Research Center, but really went viral during his presidential run. From social media to mainstream media, misinformation spread and morphed, eventually claiming Obama had attended a radical Muslim school while living in Indonesia between the ages of six and ten. In reality, the elementary school, SDN Menteng 1, was a secular institution. "The allegations are completely baseless," said vice principal Akmad Solichin in 2007, per NBC News. "Everyone's welcome here – it's a public school."

Obama tried to debunk the falsehoods himself during a 2008 rally, saying, per NBC News, "I've been to the same church – the same Christian church – for almost 20 years." He also addressed claims that he was sworn into the Senate on a Quran. "I was sworn in with my hand on the family Bible," he explained. Even so, in a 2014 poll conducted by The Washington Post, 54% of Republicans said they still believed Obama was Muslim.

And the rumors weren't just confined to the US. In 2016, after the Obama administration lifted sanctions on Iran, high-ranking Dubai official Dhahi Khalfan Tamim suggested that Obama's Shiite Muslim roots played a key role in the decision.

It was 2008 when a man named Larry Sinclair first came forward to claim he was Barack Obama's former lover. According to Sinclair, he met Obama in 1999 in Chicago and they soon proceeded to doing drugs together and having multiple sexual encounters. It was a surprising (and fake) revelation which the far-right quickly grabbed onto. As The Nation reported, the story soon morphed and evolved to include other "sources" who spread outlandish claims, like that Obama liked to visit a gay bathhouse with his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. As Poynter notes, political opponents also seized onto an old love letter written by Obama as proof of their claims. Penned in 1982 and sent to his then-girlfriend, the note included a variety of philosophical musings from the future president, including one particular passage they saw as a smoking gun. "I make love to men daily, but in the imagination," Obama wrote. "My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so, until I can think of people, not women as opposed to men."

The theory was still being widely circulated as of 2023. In fact, it was given new wings that year as Tucker Carlson actually interviewed Larry Sinclair who again claimed he had an affair with Obama. He also alleged that other men were involved, but they couldn't speak up because they had all been killed on orders from Obama's campaign.

Given how many folks were convinced that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, it should have come as no surprise when just as many decided to believe that the former POTUS was moving back to his "home country" for good. It all began when a major newspaper in Kenya called The Standard published an April Fools' Day story in 2023, claiming that Obama had decided to leave America and settle down in the country. While it did include a disclaimer, noting that the article was purely satirical, folks chose to ignore that part and instead spread the article as if it were true. AP swiftly debunked the news, but that didn't stop it from spreading.

Propagators of the fake news argued it made perfect sense, tying it back to the "birther" claims. They also pointed out that Obama's father was born in Kenya and that the president had traveled to the country during his second term in 2015, then again in 2018. Indeed, Obama enthused about his trips on Facebook, which only served to convince people further. "Kenya, of course, is the Obama ancestral home," he wrote in 2018. "I visited for the first time when I was in my twenties and I was profoundly influenced by my experiences." Not so influenced that he was ready to pack his bags and move there, though...