No, Danny Trejo Never Turned Down An Invitation To Ukraine; Actor Confirms Weird Zelensky Bribe Video Is Entirely False

Tom Tapp
·2 min read
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Early this morning a video began gaining steam online purporting that Danny Trejo refused a paid PR visit to Ukraine because President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office wanted a “kickback” from the sum paid to the Machete actor for the visit.

Deadline contacted Trejo’s representatives who confirmed that the entire story is false. Trejo was never invited to Ukraine by Zelensky. He was never offered a fee for such a trip. Zelensky’s office never asked for a kickback.

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In other words – Trejo said, via his rep: “It never happened. Someone is making things up.”

The video cites “the actor’s manager Ryan Davis” as the source of the story. Trejo has no such representative and never has, per his actual representation.

Political journalist Brian Krassenstein was among those questioning the veracity of the video this morning.

“This is a FAKE video being shared by mainly Russian-affiliated accounts, pretending to be from MSNBC,” Krassenstein wrote. He said that he confirmed the portions of the video attributed to MSNBC were not, in fact, from MSNBC. The video also weirdly uses the “MSNBC” chyron on video clips of Harvey Levin from the TMZ on TV show. Problem is, TMZ on TV does not air on MSNBC.

Among the Russian-affiliated social media accounts trumpeting the video was that of Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, who wrote: “Corruption in Ukraine? what corruption?” He followed it with emojis of the “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys. He then cited a source, the link for which takes one to an obscure Telegram page in Russian with the video embedded.

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