Kanye West is a lot of things. He’s a musical genius; he’s a fashion mogul; he’s a megalomaniac; he’s a cyberbully. What he isn’t is someone who dunks on a handicapped basketball team for fun. 

Back in 2014, the now-defunct Daily Currant website published an article with a very grabby headline: “Kanye Scores 106 Points Against Wheelchair Basketball Team”.

“A charity basketball game didn’t go exactly as planned yesterday when Kanye West scored 106 points against a team of handicapped children in wheelchairs,” the article comically said.

“The game was a PR move intended to smooth over the controversy that erupted this week between Kanye and the disabled community. At one of his concerts recently West repeatedly asked wheelchaired fans to stand, and refused to apologise for his mistake afterwards.”

The article soon went massively viral, circulating widely on social media, but an alarming amount of people missed one crucial thing: The Daily Currant was a satirical website (it didn’t have the profile of The Onion, which probably contributed).

The fake story resurfaces at least once a year. Ye’s fellow hip hop stars Cam’ron and 50 Cent even once shared it on their Instagram accounts.

This year’s resurfacing occurred this week on Wednesday, June 8th, when someone shared a screenshot of the article on Twitter. 6,600 retweets and almost 60,ooo likes later, still some clueless people remained.

“Why tf would he do that,” bemoaned a Twitter user, genuinely wondering why the biggest rapper of the 21st century found the time to showboat against a disabled sports outfit.

“That’s why he’s the goat,” declared someone. “It says more about Kanye’s image and less about my ignorance that I actually had to Google to see whether or not this was true,” someone else said.

So when you see the ‘Ye dunking on a wheelchair basketball team’ story resurface in 2023, remember not to click. Not even Ye would stoop that low.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine