He posted “Fake Gnus” on twitter pretty quickly when the story came out. The more in depth denials are coming out now. The media sees something that they think will trigger an emotional response and they all run with it. The individual can deny it once, but the story was reposted/rehashed thousands of times. The fact that the WSJ originally reported it lends credence and all the other outlets just grab it and run. Imagine you’re famous and posted something like this about you. Would you then go on the offensive denying the claim, because you’d never be able to keep up with the shares/retweets/reddit comments without a bot army.