After Alfredo "Dr. Sebi" Bowman, a self-proclaimed herbalist healer, contracted pneumonia and died in 2016 while in a Honduran jail, rumors spread on social media that he had been killed for promoting alternative diets. 

His family debunked those claims. Now, Sebi’s family is the subject of misinformation. 

PolitiFact recently fact-checked and found false a claim that "Dr. Sebi’s cousin was sent to prison" for revealing "gatekept health secrets." 

Other Facebook posts now claim that "Dr. Sebi’s daughter was SENTENCED to 155 years in prison for revealing TOP SECRET health hacks." 

These posts were 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 and Instagram.)

Featured Fact-check

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stated on May 21, 2024 in X posts

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We found no evidence that this claim is authentic. We looked for credible news stories to corroborate the posts but found none, and discovered no public statements from Sebi’s daughter, Kellie Bowman, about the claim. We reached out to her for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

But an image of the supposed incarcerated daughter in at least one of the posts making the claim is suspect. Doing a reverse image search, we found nothing connecting the picture to Sebi, and if you look closely at the woman’s bound wrists, they seem to converge into one sole hand. 

This post and the post about Sebi’s cousin supposedly being "life in prison" for revealing "gatekept health secrets" seem to follow a formula. Yet another post PolitiFact fact-checked claimed that the cousin of Barbara O’Neill, a former Australian naturopath, was "sentenced to life in prison for revealing … gatekept health secrets."

That post was fake, and so is this one. 

We rate it False.