Candace Owens is once again in the spotlight — this time for promoting what appears to be a completely fabricated email.
On Thursday, Owens posted a screenshot to social media claiming it showed evidence of an Israeli rabbi — Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Riskin — offering $2,500 in Bitcoin to a Christian pastor in exchange for preaching against her and Tucker Carlson. The email, written under the banner of the “Center for Jewish–Christian Understanding and Cooperation,” encourages clergy to denounce “media voices that spread division” and accuses Owens and Carlson of echoing antisemitic tropes (fact-check: they do).
But there’s just one glaring issue: the email is almost certainly fake.
For anyone familiar with Rabbi Riskin — a widely respected 84-year-old interfaith leader — the idea that he’s sending out crypto bribes to influence church sermons is laughable. There’s no evidence he authored, sent, or even knows about this message. Several people close to Riskin have privately said it’s unclear if he even knows what Bitcoin is, let alone how to send it.
Still, Owens ran with it. “This is just the beginning of our investigation,” she posted ominously, calling the alleged plot “demonic” and accusing Jewish voices of orchestrating an online smear campaign against her and Carlson.
In response, Ohr Torah Stone, the network Rabbi Riskin founded, released a formal statement calling her accusations “entirely false, baseless, and defamatory.” They made clear that neither Riskin nor anyone associated with their organization has ever paid or offered compensation to clergy to make political statements — in Bitcoin or otherwise.
There’s still no confirmed source of the email, but it has all the hallmarks of a classic hoax: official-sounding language, a whiff of conspiracy, and just enough plausibility to get someone like Owens to bite. Whether she was tricked or just didn’t bother to verify it before posting is anyone’s guess — but either way, it’s a dangerous game.
Smearing a rabbi with a fake Bitcoin bribery scandal isn’t “telling the truth.” It’s reckless. And in a time when antisemitism and conspiracy theories are rising in tandem, it’s also deeply irresponsible.
