Have you seen the video that appears to show a who’s woman shocked to learn the man she hooked up with many years ago just became the pope? The claim is that Chicago-born Robert Prevost, who was elected pope on Thursday and took the name Leo XIV, supposedly had a tryst in his youth with this woman who can’t believe it. But the video is fake. Completely, totally fake.
The viral video appears to show a woman talking to two people on her computer, one of whom is supposed to be her mom. “My mom’s situationship is the pope of the Catholic church,” the video’s creator can be heard saying as she laughs. “My mom hooked up with the pope.”
The text on the screen claims this sexual encounter happened when her “mom” was 19 years old, something that would seem plausible if it were made by real people out in the world. After all, Prevost didn’t take his solemn vows until he was 26 years old, according to the New York Times. The problem is that this video was made by a comedian who often makes fake claims in order to go viral.
The creator, Louisa Melcher, frequently makes videos attached to recent news events, claiming to be at the center of them. For example, she made a video about falling off the stage during Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show, something people thought they saw on TV. Or another about falling off a boat during the Summer Olympics in 2024, which showed her with a neck brace.
Sometimes, Melcher won’t necessarily peg her performance to something in the news and appears to create absurd situations out of whole cloth, like when he’s claimed her sister’s fiancé said her name during their wedding vows or claimed an influencer had used a bad photo of her in a poll judging her attractiveness. In another video, she claims to take the books out of Little Free Libraries around her neighborhood and resells them on Amazon.
Melcher seems to have really figured out how to hack the social media environment in a way that gets her videos to go viral through rage-bait, and she’s been doing it for years. The astounding part is that the internet is apparently big enough that she can keep making these ridiculous claims, and people don’t recognize her as a comedian. Sometimes, news outlets will even take her viral videos at face value and run with her claims as reality. And the comments in her videos make it clear that while some people know by now she’s making jokes, a lot of people think she’s serious.
“i have a little free library outside my house and if an amazon reseller came and took all the books i would literally cry,” one comment on Melcher’s video reads. “this is so mean.”
The video claiming to show her “mom” being shocked about the pope has over 1.4 million views on Instagram and over 5.6 million on TikTok at the time of this writing. But it’s spreading quickly enough on Friday that it looks like it will really explode in popularity over the weekend. But it’s staged. Nothing about it can be trusted.
Melcher’s video about the new pope is funny, but it would be much funnier if it were real. If you’re seeing this one in your feed, we’re sad to report it’s completely fake.
