The Fearless Blogger

A Very Alive Zach Braff (from his Facebook page)

In the past few months, rumors of various celebrity deaths have been popping up on the internet.  With sites like Facebook and Twitter, these rumors travel far and fast.

The most recent, occurring yesterday, involved two stories about ‘Scrubs’ star Zach Braff.

The first, seemingly posted by a New Zealand news site,  stated that

reports from New Zealand Police officials indicate that the actor fell more than 60 feet to his death on the Kauri Cliffs while on-set

In reality, the page was generated by some anti-Zach using FakeAWish.com. (Based on the site’s “In the News’ section, this site has likely been the culprit of several other celebrity death rumors)

The second was a fake CNN page (since removed)  which reported the actor’s suicide.  Chris Laganella, the site‘s owner posted the following explanation

Wayyy back in 2007, I copied CNN’s webpage and changed some text and some pictures to reflect an apparent Zach Braff suicide. This wasn’t a publicity stunt, it wasn’t a plea for hits, or to promote anything else. It was just to fool some of my friends. We’re really big Scrubs fans and really big Zach Braff fans. I made this page to fool them, called them to my computer, and showed them to get their reaction. I obviously told them it was a joke afterwards, but I neglected to take the page down.

Apparently, something clicked with someone on the internet today. I saw my bandwidth for chrisbox.com ran out earlier, so I increased it and looked at my traffic. I saw all the hits to braff.html, and started researching. This was the second largest trending topic on Twitter along with tons of links on Facebook. I had people like Perez Hilton and even an ABC spokesperson commenting on this.

Laganella continues, apologizing

So let’s just clear some stuff up. I did not make this page to intentionally fool everyone on the internet. I didn’t expect it to even be made public. Ever. I’m sorry if I scared everyone out there.

Zach, sorry if you got offended by me posting a fake suicide about you on the internet. Your 32,000 square foot house would be pretty empty without you. Thanks for (apparently) taking it lightly, since I haven’t gotten a letter about a lawsuit yet. Just so you know, I’m a huge fan; that’s the only reason I made this page, believe it or not. Also, sorry for upsetting your mother :(

Unfortunately for Chris, his apology did not get to Zach Braff before the actor posted a YouTube video.

In the video, Zach assures the world he is, indeed, alive and seems pretty good-natured about the event. However he does make a point to call out Chris for the prank, telling him he’s won Braff’s first “Douche of the Day” award for making Braff’s mom upset.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

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