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Fact-check: Black Lives Matter protesters did not deface Vietnam Memorial in Washington

Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY
·3 min read

Claim: Black Lives Matter protesters deface Vietnam Memorial in Washington

There are few monuments in the U.S. that stir emotions more than the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which bears the names of more than 58,000 Americans.

A Facebook user posted a photo on July 30, purportedly showing graffiti scrawled on that memorial and claimed it was defaced by Black Lives Matter protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis in May.

The Facebook user who posted the item did not immediately respond to our inquiry regarding the item.

"Disgusting! BLM protestors decided to vandalize a veterans memorial for those who died in the Vietnam War! But yeah... these are normal people who are sane and peaceful. NOT! I hope this pisses you off enough to share it!" the post reads.

Vandalism is 4 years old

A Google reverse image search shows that the image in the post is not that of the wall in Washington, but of a Vietnam memorial in Venice Beach, California, that was defaced in 2016, long before Floyd was killed.

The CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, KCAL, aired a report on the vandalism at the time that depicts the defaced wall, which bears the names of more than 2,200 Americans who died in the war.

The Venice Beach memorial, created by a local artists, was dedicated in 1992.

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In July 2016, a 24-year-old "graffiti artist" named Angel Castro was arrested on charges of defacing the wall just before Memorial Day that year, according to the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press.

Castro, who is nicknamed "Liter," was sentenced in 2017 to four years in state prison for vandalism, to which he had pleaded no contest. He was also ordered to pay $38,000 restitution. He was one of four "taggers" – nicknamed Noner, Pheb, Snake and Liter –who defaced the wall, according to the AP.

The wall was restored in May 2017 and was treated with a protective coating that allows any graffiti to be easily washed off.

"For us to take this back, for us to restore it to its original luster and for us to present it to our neighborhood is a big, important thing," said George Francisco, president of the Venice Chamber of Commerce, according to the KNBC affiliate, the Los Angeles affiliate of NBC.

The claim of BLM protesters defacing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was also found to be false by PolitiFact, The Associated Press, and Reuters.

Our ruling: False

Research shows that the purported image of a defaced Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 2020 was in fact a Vietnam memorial defaced by "taggers" in Venice Beach, California, in 2016, for which at least one person was convicted. There was no connection to Black Lives Matter. We rate this claim as FALSE.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact-check: BLM protesters did not deface Vietnam memorial in DC