Fact Check: Wife divorced husband for faking as deaf and dumb is a fictitious story

A story that says that a man faked being deaf and dumb for 62 years to avoid listening to his wife has gained a lot of traction on social media. Many users have shared it on Facebook, referring to an article published by a website called 'World News Daily Report'.

The article says "a man from Waterbury in Connecticut faces divorce after his wife found out that he was not actually deaf and had been faking it for more than 62 years to avoid having to listen to her."

India Today Anti Fake News War room (AFWA) has found this news to be completely false. 'World News Daily Report' is a Canadian website notorious for publishing fictitious stories.

As per the report published on the website 'World News Daily Report' 84-year-old Barry Dawson never spoke a single word in front of his 80-year-old wife Dorothy during the decades they lived together because she was "annoyingly chatty". Ms Dawson caught him lying and filed for divorce as she found a YouTube video of her husband singing during a karaoke night in a bar.

We found the website full of such gossip articles and weird stories. But scrolling down the webpage we found a disclaimer given at the bottom of the page. The disclaimer reads, "World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle."

Fact Check website Snopes had also reported about this fictitious article. According to this report, website World News Daily Report used "photos of an actual Florida couple, married 67 years, whose 2017 divorce filing was newsworthy because of the vast real estate holdings to be divided up by the court." This news was published in an American daily from Florida, The Palm Beach Post on 2018.