Sheriff candidate again shares fake endorsement
Orange County sheriff candidate Darryl Sheppard’s campaign shared a bogus Facebook post Thursday night, claiming the local Republican Party endorsed his opponent, retired Florida Highway Patrol Chief Joe Lopez.
The spurious endorsement, which originated on a Facebook page falsely claiming to belong to the local Republican party, includes a news release with fake quotes attributed to Lopez and Orange County GOP Chair Charles Hart. The post was later deleted.
“The Orange County Republican Party denounces this stunt,” Hart said in a statement. “I and the Orange County Republican Party have not and do not endorse anyone in this race. On behalf of the Orange County Republican Party, I demand whoever posted this blatant lie take this lie down immediately or face legal repercussions.”
Lopez, who is running as an independent, said the fake post “continues to expose who Darryl Sheppard really is,” adding that Sheppard is “desperate for attention.”
Sheppard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post marks the latest in a series of fake endorsements shared on the Facebook page for Sheppard’s campaign. Earlier this week, the page posted an image made to look like a tweet from President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The tweet falsely said Trump endorsed former Orlando police Chief John Mina, an independent candidate running against Sheppard and Lopez.
The fake tweet — which was also removed from Sheppard’s Facebook page sometime Friday— also claimed Sheppard was endorsed by Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum. Neither Trump nor Gillum has endorsed a candidate for Orange County sheriff.
Being falsely associated with Trump or the Republican Party could be politically harmful to candidates for office in Orange County, where Republicans are outnumbered by both Democrats and independents, and where voters backed Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, 60 percent to 35 percent.
Florida law prohibits candidates from representing that a person or group has provided an endorsement unless the candidate has been given specific approval to do so. Sheppard has also faced criticism for another image posted to the Facebook page: a campaign flier that showed the candidate posing with prominent Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Val Demings.
Demings demanded that Sheppard stop using her image in a way she said implied that she had endorsed him. “I would not endorse Darryl Sheppard for ‘Dog Catcher’ of Orange County for fear the canines would lodge complaints,” Demings said in a statement.