At one point, far-Left “fact-checking” website Snopes was Facebook’s designated arbiter of truth. Eventually, the social media network kicked Snopes out of its fact checking program completely — but not before helping propel it from simply popularity to the go-to source for liberals when they needed to “disprove” something a conservative said. Sure, Snopes has been caught lying repeatedly and misrepresenting satire as “fake news” for the clicks, but the Left still loves the garbage pumped out by founder David Mikkelson and his band of “journalists.” To them, Mikkelson can do no wrong. But they’ll have a hard time ignoring and excusing the fact that the Snopes founder’s ex-wife is speaking out, claiming “he raped me every morning.”

Mikkelson started the website with his first wife Barbara, who ultimately sold her share of the site after divorcing him. Mikkelson spent a lot of the site’s income on prostitutes and embezzled nearly $100,000. And apparently he liked one of those prostitutes, Elyssa Young, enough to marry her. Now Young is speaking out about the time she spent married to the Snopes founder:

“The worst thing about covid-19 for me personally is how complete my comprehension is that if i were to contract it I would die utterly alone,” she wrote on Facebook. “My parents are completely self absorbed narcissistic pieces of work only concerned with their emotional blackmailing and thier narcissistic supply (My own mother who was once the director of peirce county rape relief, and now is ‘lay leader of the world for the methodist church doesn’t want to disrupt her happiness with my ‘rich husband’ who quite honestly, raped me every morning.” Young says that Mikkelson “engaged with” her “ONLY while i was asleep and clothed for tearful years.”

“And yes i regularly sobbed to him to stop and his therapist what was going on. I went to multiple therapists and told them what was happening but they decide upon speaking with david mikkelson that i was ‘on drugs’ and that I was the problem,” she says. “Not the raping… I went to multiple lawyers all of which were happy to take my savings and then tell me how wonderful david was and that i should not persue domestic violence charges.”

“He refuses all communication because of course he knows i will not keep quiet so villifying me is of course the logical answer,” she says. “And villifying is his specialty.”

Mikkelson, who is currently suspended from his own site for plagiarism, refuses to take responsibility for any of his actions — but this is the man liberals trust to tell them what is and is not true. Disgusting.

Liberal “fact checker” website Snopes is the go-to for leftists who need material with which to spam comment sections when they don’t want to do their own research or actually know anything. Snopes has been caught lying many times over the years, even going so far as to misrepresent clear satire sites like the Babylon Bee as “fake news” in an effort to justify their now-gone spot as Facebook’s go-to fact checking organization. Now, Snopes’ co-founder has been caught plagiarizing dozens of articles.

A Buzzfeed News investigation found that not only was co-founder David Mikkelson plagiarized dozens of articles between 2015 and 2019, pulling from source materials like the Guardian and the LA Times. When Buzzfeed contacted Snopes about the plagiarism, the website conducted an internal audit. What they found was shocking:

After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.

Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.

used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.

“Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop,” Marchionni added. “It has no place in any context within this organization.”

Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”

Snopes plans to retract all of the plagiarized articles and disable ads on them, though there’s no telling how much money Mikkelson’s shady behavior made the site. An editor’s note will also explain that the site’s co-founder is a shady piece of garbage who has nothing resembling an ethical code — though it’s unlikely that the note will explain this honestly.

“There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry,” Mikkelson says in the most half-hearted apology in existence. In fact, he says that his unethical behavior comes from a lack of a journalism background:

 “I didn’t come from a journalism background,” he said. “I wasn’t used to doing news aggregation. A number of times I crossed the line to where it was copyright infringement. I own that.”

Multiple employees confirm that it wasn’t just Mikkelson doing this. It was the whole staff.  “He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time,” says former Snopes writer Brooke Binkowski. “I hated it and wouldn’t tell any of the staff to do it, but he did it all the time.” He also told staffers to find articles on competitors’ sites and  “rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.”

The next time someone posts a Snopes article, be sure to remind them of this.