Danney Williams: Black Arkansas Man Goes Viral For His Claim To Be Bill Clinton’s Illegitimate Son

Danney Williams is again making the claim that he is the illegitimate son of Bill Clinton, and now the story more than a decade old has new legs online.

For more than 15 years, Williams has claimed that he is the result of an affair between his mother — a prostitute living in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the early 1980s — and former President Bill Clinton. Williams has been open about his claim long before Hillary Clinton’s run for president but has been getting more attention in recent months as the fringes of right-wing media have latched onto his claims.

And Danney Williams got his biggest audience ever thanks to the Drudge Report, which highlighted the claims by linking to Williams’ Twitter page and one to a video of Trump surrogate and adviser Roger Stone saying verifying the claims. The report quickly went viral, spreading from the Drudge Report to some other right-wing sites and conspiracy theory blogs.

Danney Williams, who has also gone by Danny Williams, is direct about his claims.

“My name is Danney Lee Williams, I’m the son of the 42nd President of the United States -Bill Clinton. He abandon me at birth for political gain,” he wrote on Facebook.

But the allegations from Danney Williams seem to have already been proven wrong. The media watchdog Accuracy in Media took on the story back in 1999, when it first came out and DNA evidence proved that Williams could not be Clinton’s son.

“In reporting that the DNA test had cleared Clinton, The Washington Post gave none of this background. Referring to it as ‘a love child story,’ it did not reveal that the mother was a black prostitute. It described her claim as ‘utterly bogus’ and ‘slimy.’ That was how the Washington Post justified its never having reported the story. The Post and others rushed to publicize a bogus claim that DNA tests had proven that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child by a slave. The British journal that first published the claim has now admitted that it was inaccurate, but as Time‘s headline on the Danny story showed, this has not erased the original error from the minds of all journalists.”

Others pointed out that the Drudge Report itself has already reported back in 1999 that Danney Williams was not the son of Bill Clinton.

This isn’t the first time Bill Clinton’s past has come back thanks to right-wing media. Over the weekend, conspiracy theory-loving radio host Alex Jones told listeners that he would give $5,000 to any person willing to wear a “Bill Clinton RAPE” t-shirt (one that Jones had designed and sells on his website) on live television and yell the words “Bill Clinton is a rapist!”

Early on Saturday morning, someone took him up on that offer. A young man wearing a blue suit appeared in the background of a live shot of Fox and Friends, then slowly took off his shirt to reveal the Clinton t-shirt underneath. He shouted “Bill Clinton is a rapist!” over and over before security could finally drag him away.

Monday morning was a very busy time for Clinton conspiracy theories. At the same time that the story claiming Danney Williams was the illegitimate son of Bill Clinton began going viral online, a separate story about Clinton’s wife started gaining traction. A website called True Pundit cited a source within the State Department claiming that Hillary Clinton tried to order a drone strike against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange back in 2010. Like the story about Danney Williams, the drone strike report came under fire for being incredibly suspect and devoid of any form of proof.

[Featured Image by Danney Williams/Facebook]