The famous propaganda technique attributed to Göbbels of “a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth” proves that the familiarity of information can overcome our rationality. That is what makes absurd or implausible viral hoaxes end up being considered real even though they never existed.
This is the case of one of those fake news from the oral tradition in Spain that still today, almost twenty-five years after the hoax spread, must be denied, since it continues to be told in informal gatherings as if it were true. The scene of Ricky Martin, a fifteen-year-old girl, a dog and a jar of jam never happened during the broadcast of the Surprise, Surprise! program.
The Anatomy of… program has tried to clarify where this widespread hoax came from and what gave it the appearance of reality so that it was believed by so many people to the point of assuring that they had seen it. To get closer to what happened, they have had Giorgio Aresu, director and producer of the format; Mar BombÃn, assistant director; Juan Sanguino, journalist; Isabel Gemio, presenter until 1998; and Javier Urra, defender of minors in the Community of Madrid.
The bizarre cartoon repeated over and over again imagined that Ricky Martin found himself in the closet of a room full of hidden cameras to surprise a follower. Suddenly, the supposed fan came to her room, she undressed, spread jam on her genital area and called her dog to lick the jam while all of Spain watched the scene live.
Although it never happened, the workers of the program were not oblivious to the matter. The management of Antena 3 asked the director of the format for explanations, even though the facts had not existed. They came to doubt and even themselves and reviewed the images of all the programs that had been broadcast before to make sure that this scene never happened, as they could verify.
For their part, Ricky Martin’s team, who visited the show in 1996, sent a fax demanding a denial when the story reached their ears. Due to the widespread dissemination and acceptance of the false news, the association in defense of the rights of the child Prodeni came to file a lawsuit against the production that forced the Prosecutor’s Office and the Children’s Ombudsman in Madrid to investigate what had happened.
The controversy ended with a live denial by Concha Velasco: “We have been victims of a hoax. They have attacked us in a kind of collective madness. An attack in which they spoke of something that never happened and protagonists who have never existed. He has talked a lot about it and we want to do it today by saying only 3 words: Everything is a lie”. But the hoax has continued to circulate more than two decades later.
