Rumor about Patti LaBelle fighting Karoline Leavitt on TV is fake

In September 2025, a rumor spread that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and singer Patti LaBelle fought on live TV.

For example, a post on Facebook claimed the fight started after Leavitt called LaBelle "just a singer." In response, according to the post, LaBelle put "her hands on the table [and] delivered seven words" that "froze the entire studio" (archived):

A number of Snopes readers searched the website and emailed asking whether the story was true.

However, the claim about Leavitt and LaBelle was false. It stemmed from Facebook posts attempting to get users to click on links to supposedly tell the "full story." But, in reality, those links are pages on advertisement-filled websites that seem to profit with each click, no matter the truthfulness of the content.

A pinned comment under the above-mentioned post included a link to a Sept. 5, 2025, article on a website that laid out more details about the alleged confrontation, along with numerous advertisements.

Days earlier, the same Facebook account posted (archived) a different version of the story in which LaBelle called Leavitt a "privilege puppet":

A pinned comment under that post also included a link to a separate article.

However, both versions of the story were fiction. Searches on Google, Google News, DuckDuckGo and Bing revealed no reports of an altercation between the two women and no video clips of this supposed fight.

Both articles read like short fictional stories, not news articles. Snopes ran the text of both stories through detectors of AI-generated content, and those tools revealed a high chance that AI had generated at least part, or the entirety, of each text.

The Facebook page that spread this rumor, Harmony Haven, appears to be dedicated to LaBelle, and all pinned comments beneath posts seemed to link to the same website. 

Snopes previously published an explanation of so-called "AI slop," spam content produced using AI tools. Further, we have debunked several AI-generated rumors about Leavitt in the past, including the claim that she debated Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show.