Dustin not dusted off
Saved By the Bell actor caught up in wild death rumour
The final bell hasn't rung for Dustin Diamond just yet.
Late last week, social media users were flooded by reports that the Saved By the Bell actor had been killed in a prison riot after an article on the satirical website Ringssss started making the rounds.
But Reuters fact-checked the death claim and found it to be untrue.
“Diamond is not dead,” Reuters writes.
“The shared article is meant to be satirical. The death of a public figure like this would have gathered significant attention and would have been reported by news organizations.
“Aside from the satirical article, Reuters found no other report.”
In its `About Us' section, Reuters notes, Ringsssss describes itself as a “fabricated satirical newspaper and comedy website” that uses fictional names in its stories “except in cases when public figures are being satirized.”
Diamond, 43, has been the subject of death hoaxes before, with Newsweek quoting an interview he gave to Florida Today about the constant rumours.
“Some things people say are loosely based on the truth and others are entirely fake,” the actor, who played Screech on the beloved `90s sitcom, said.
“One of the craziest was I was supposedly on the back of a motorcycle with (Diamond's one-time Saved By the Bell co-star) Mark-Paul Gosselaar in New Zealand, and while we were going down the freeway an overpass collapsed and I was beheaded. I mean, that was some tall tale.”
Further debunking the death claims was the fact that Diamond is not in prison.
But the actor did do jail time in Wisconsin for stabbing a man in 2014.
He also spent a few days in the slammer in 2016 for a probation violation.
It is not known if Diamond will appear in the upcoming Saved By the Bell reboot, but in a 2016 interview with Dr. Oz, he apologized for his destructive behaviour following the show's end, which included releasing a sex tape in 2006 and a tell-all book he wrote in 2009.
He also acknowledged the show's lasting impact, telling Oz, “I've had people multiple times come up to me, I mean, we're talking hundreds and ... thousands of people that have come up and said, `You got me through high school. You know I was Screech in my school and you represented everything that I felt at that time,' which I never thought of when I was doing that show.”