Old video by Sinead O’Connor shared as one shot hours before her death

By: Soham Shah
August 2 2023

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Context

A video of renowned Irish singer and activist Sinead O'Connor is circulating on Facebook along with the claim that it was recorded just hours before her death in July 2023.

In the video, O'Connor talks about her struggles with loneliness and opened up about living with mental illness. She states she had left her family in Ireland and was staying in a motel in New Jersey. 

The video carries the overlaid text, “Sinead O'Connor 27.7.2023 Video made only a few hours before she passed away Allah yirhamah She really needed HELP.” It has garnered over 2k likes and 1.3k shares. An archive link of the post can be accessed here.

However, this is an old video and was not made a few hours before her death. O'Connor was found dead in her London flat on July 26, 2023, and not in New Jersey. The exact date and cause of her death are still unknown, though police have said that the death is not being treated as suspicious.

In fact

In a reverse image search of keyframes from the video, we found the same clip posted by the magazine Inside Edition on their YouTube channel on August 9, 2017. The description of the video said that O’Connor posted the video on her social media on Monday, August 7, 2017. 

An article by the British magazine NME published on August 9, 2017, reported that the video was posted on Facebook. While the link is no longer available, the report detailed the exact words O’Connor spoke in the viral video, proving that it was the same one.

O’Connor did post a different video on the platform X (formerly Twitter) weeks before her death on July 9, 2023, to prove her identity on her new account @786OmShahid.

The verdict

This video was originally posted on O'Connor's social media in August 2017, and not hours before the singer's death in 2023. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.