Surprise! Neither Bill Cosby Nor Rihanna Are Dead
by Sean ComerNeither Bill Cosby nor Rihanna has died, as E! News has helpfully confirmed Tuesday morning.
Typically, this is the kind of statement to which many would symbolically affirm an absence of fecal matter to a British investigator renowned for his deductive reasoning. This being the Internet, everything demands the most crystalline clarification.
On Monday, both became victims of online death hoaxes - in Cosby's case, for the second time this month. The famed funnyman's rumored demise begat the Facebook hub "R.I.P. Bill Cosby" - or, for all anyone knows, it was the page that begat the tidal wave of rumor - and the page quickly accrued as of the minute of this report 266,228 "likes" exactly. The 73-year-old comic's death was widely reported on Twitter at the beginning of August, and Cosby expressed his public dismay at his own early-bird memorialization.
"Emotional friends have called about this misinformation," Cosby tweeted. "To the people behind the foolishness, I'm not sure you see how upsetting this is."
For the sake of a running tally, that makes twice this month and at least three times this year.
Since somebody believed Rihanna should clearly endure a little more grief for the amusement of the world's trolls, the Barbadan Grammy winner and "Battleship" co-star was also reported dead this week. This wasn't simply Facebook's rumor mill to churn, though. Oh, no. Gossip Cop debunked the hoax that a French news site picked up and ran with the story that the singer had "sunk into an [alcohol-induced] coma before succumbing to a heart attack."
According to Gossip Cop, the screen-captured "article" is in fact a photoshopped phony. Last January, she was also rumored to have died in a plane crash.