Diddy didn’t write purported QAnon conspiracy theory book

What looks like a screenshot of a celebrity book listing at Barnes & Noble that lends credence to QAnon conspiracy theories is not as it seems. 

A photo of music magnate Sean “Diddy” Combs, recently imprisoned on charges including sex trafficking, appears below the words “The Adrenochrome Witch by Sean Diddy Combs” in the image, shared in a Sept. 25 Instagram post. 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

Adrenochrome is a chemical compound produced by oxidizing adrenaline, and it’s regularly mentioned in QAnon theories purporting the baseless idea that a global cabal of pedophiles is harvesting the chemical from the blood of children to stay young and healthy.  

But Combs didn’t write a book about an adrenochrome witch. And the book doesn’t exist.

“This is not an authentic book and we do not have it listed on our website,” Barnes & Noble said in a statement to PolitiFact. The company also noted that the logo in the Instagram post’s image  is not the book seller’s current logo. 

We found no book listing by Combs or about an adrenochrome witch when searching Barnes & Noble’s website, but doing a Google search for the title led us to a sample page on Barnes & Noble’s “Nook for Web” site, which allows users to read e-books and e-book samples on a computer. 

The sample page used the same image of Combs and said “The Adrenochrome Witch by Diddy.” 

We asked the company about the sample page and received a statement that said: “This is an archived sample page that was taken down in July 2020 when it was deemed to be fake. There is no link to the actual ‘book’ or a link where a copy can be bought.” 

The archived page was deleted after PolitiFact asked about it. 

As Lead Stories noted when it investigated a similar claim in 2020,  a self-publishing platform called Barnes & Noble Press allows people to “easily upload their books and make it available for purchase on BN.com or NOOK devices.”

The Washington Post reported Oct. 1 that Amazon had pulled from its site a memoir purportedly written by Kim Porter, Combs’ longtime partner and mother to three of his children, about her relationship with Combs; Porter’s family and friends have said the book is fabricated. (Porter died in 2018.) 

A book by a high-profile rapper and music producer such as Combs would draw media attention, news coverage and legitimate listings in both brick-and-mortar and online marketplaces. A storyline that touches on sex trafficking would certainly be mentioned in recent reporting concerning Combs’ criminal case. But no such evidence exists to corroborate the claim that he wrote this book. 

We rate that claim False.