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Roberta’s, Popular Brooklyn Restaurant, Is Pulled Into ‘Pizzagate’ Hoax

Roberta’s in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in 2013. The restaurant received two threatening phone calls in the past week.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Rumors linking a well-known Brooklyn restaurant to the so-called Pizzagate hoax seem to have emerged in posts on an online message board late last month.

By then, discussions of the hoax, a baseless story that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was connected to a child-abuse ring, had moved to a site called Voat after being shut down on a more popular site, Reddit.

A Voat user wrote of finding a reference to Roberta’s — a popular pizza restaurant in the Bushwick section — in an email from Mrs. Clinton’s private server released by the State Department. Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, attended a private birthday party for a prominent Democratic donor at Roberta’s in 2012.

A discussion ensued as to whether the Roberta’s logo, a skeleton holding a pizza paddle, and other, similar images connected the restaurant to the conspiracy. And so Roberta’s — a local haunt, a favorite among tourists and a place to get a good charred-crust pie — was suddenly pulled into a national debate over the spread of false information online.

The police said on Wednesday that Roberta’s had been targeted for harassment twice in the past week since being linked to the hoax.

The bogus story originally focused on a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, which has been subjected to a barrage of threats and unwanted attention since the conspiracy theory began to spread in the days before the election.

One person drawn by the hoax came at the restaurant to live-stream activity there. Others have stood outside holding signs. And this week, a 28-year-old man was arrested after he drove to Washington from North Carolina and fired an assault-style rifle inside the restaurant, the authorities said. The man, Edgar M. Welch, told the authorities he planned to help rescue children after reading the fake news story online.

In the case of Roberta’s, commenters on Voat and social media sites mined the restaurant’s social media accounts for images that some felt represented expressions of Satanism or the occult: a logo from its wine menu of a skeletal hand holding a wine glass under an upside-down cross, and a T-shirt in which some discerned a crescent moon and a star. One Voat commenter described seeing a “little kid with his hands tied together” embedded in the T-shirt logo.

“The more I dig those emails and new findings,” another Voat commenter wrote, “the clearer it gets, most of those so-called elites made a cult out of pizza. Disturbing indeed.”

A YouTube user incorporated some of the images into a video linking the restaurant to the Pizzagate hoax.

“The images speak for themselves,” the person wrote in a caption accompanying the video, which was posted on Dec. 1. That day, the police in New York said, an unidentified person called Roberta’s and told a worker there that she was “going to bleed and be tortured.”

The next day, Roberta’s received another harassing phone call, the police said. A man called to complain about the restaurant’s connection to the Pizzagate hoax after reading about it online, the police said.

No arrests have been made in connection with the episodes, which were reported by DNAinfo. Workers who answered the phone at Roberta’s on Wednesday referred inquiries to the restaurant’s communications department, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The YouTube video linking Roberta’s to the hoax had been watched more than 10,000 times before being taken down on Wednesday. The user who posted it did not respond to messages requesting comment. According to The Washington Post, automated bot accounts on social media have helped spread the hoax.

Not everyone was buying the conspiracy theory about Roberta’s on the message boards. One Voat user, saying the restaurant looked pretty great, wrote: “Again, not a shill. I think it just genuinely looks cool.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Popular Restaurant in Brooklyn Is Pulled Into Vortex of the ‘Pizzagate’ Hoax. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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