For weeks, people in Silicon Valley have been passing around a satirical publication's fake report about a supposed prostitution raid at a hotel on Sand Hill Road, the hub of California's venture-capital firms.
A local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, has investigated. Good news! The fake story is fake.
For one thing, the Rosewood Hotel is in Menlo Park, Calif., not Palo Alto. But in any event, there don't seem to have been any reports of illegal activity there, and the hotel's general manager strongly denies that there's anything more risqué than your run-of-the-mill seed funding going on.
What has been happening at the Rosewood: an informal event every Thursday known as "Cougar Night," where women are openly looking for husbands, Linx Dating owner and self-described "love concierge" Amy Andersen told the Mercury News.
The fake report, and the hubbub it's caused online, has had one real effect: Cougar Night seems to have gotten less popular recently.