Fact Check: Rumor That Patrick Mahomes Bought Hotel and Fired Employees After Experiencing Racism Is False
In January 2025, internet users shared a rumor that Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes bought a hotel and fired its employees after experiencing racial discrimination there. (Mahomes is the son of a Black father and a white mother. He told a GQ reporter in 2020 that he identifies as Black.)
Multiple Snopes readers wrote in to ask whether the story was true. The claim also appeared in a Jan. 8, 2025, post (archived) on the Facebook page NFL Playoffs (which is not affiliated with the National Football League), as well as other (archived) posts on Facebook (archived).
(Facebook page NFL Playoffs)
The NFL Playoffs post on Facebook linked to an article (archived) on the website btuatu.com, which is affiliated with the NFL Playoffs page, according to that page’s Intro section page. The text of that article began:
On a cool autumn evening, the Royal Beacon Hotel’s lobby gleamed with polished marble floors and soft lighting. Guests in tailored suits and designer dresses glided past, exchanging quiet greetings. Behind the front desk, Marissa, a young receptionist, prided herself on managing the hotel’s elite ambiance. She believed she could spot the right sort of clientele from a distance.
As the clock approached midnight, a tall, broad-shouldered Black man stepped inside, wearing a simple hoodie and jeans. His face was friendly but weary, as if he had come from a long journey. He approached the front desk, and Marissa’s smile tightened, turning polite but guarded. She sized him up, noting his casual clothes. This wasn’t how their usual guests dressed.”
The post on Facebook and the Btuatu.com article each featured a collage of two photos, with the same image on the top of both collages and different images on the bottom. A comparison can be seen below.
(Right: Facebook page NFL Playoffs/Left: Btuatu.com)
The upper photo in both collages appeared to depict Mahomes and three other people in a lobby. Red circles surrounded the heads of the two figures on the far left and right of the photo, at least one of whom appeared to be a security guard or police officer, and a red arrow pointed toward the head of the fourth figure, who appeared to be a hotel employee behind a desk.
The two lower images were real photos that had previously appeared in legitimate news coverage of Mahomes.
The lobby photo, by contrast, showed signs of digital manipulation. For example, visible in the lower right corner of the Btuatu.com version of the upper image was a watermark from Snapedit, a digital photo editing tool described on its website as “AI-powered.”
Another sign the image was manipulated was that Mahomes appeared to have no shadow, as can be seen in the detail below.
(Facebook page NFL Playoffs)
A reverse image search of the part of the photo featuring Mahomes showed that section of the image was a flipped and cropped version of a photo Mahomes originally posted to his official Instagram account on Oct. 23, 2023. (The photo in question is the second in the carousel; a screenshot is embedded below.)
(@patrickmahomes on Instagram)
A reverse image search of the lobby photo with Mahomes removed found that a nearly identical photo was the thumbnail image for a 12-minute video by the YouTube account Storytime With Solomon, titled “Racist Hotel Rejects Big Shaq, The Next Day He Returns as the Owner AND …” The only apparent difference was that the YouTube image featured O’Neal instead of Mahomes.
The thumbnail image, a screenshot of which is embedded below, did not appear in the video itself.
(Storytime With Solomon on YouTube)
The description of that video included the key words “fictional” and “fictional stories.” In other words, the Storytime With Solomon video did not claim to depict or describe real events.
A disclaimer in the description also stated that the video featured “Altered or synthetic content,” noting that “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.”
We submitted the video’s transcript to the AI text detectors GPTZero and Sapling, both of which found a strong likelihood that the text of the story about O’Neal was also a product of artificial intelligence.
The text of the Btuatu.com article about Mahomes was nearly identical to the first five minutes of the Storytime With Solomon video about O’Neal, differing only in that Mahomes’ name appeared in the article where O’Neal’s did in the video. A screenshot of the transcript of the video’s first 36 seconds can be seen below.
(Storytime With Solomon on YouTube)
The Btuatu.com article did not reproduce the entire story from the Storytime With Solomon video. At a point roughly corresponding to the video’s five-minute time-stamp, the article abruptly switched focus to an apparently unrelated story about Mahomes’ family enjoying a snow day.
To summarize, the claim about Mahomes buying a hotel and firing its employees originated from a partial transcription of a fictional story about O’Neal buying a hotel after experiencing racism, with all instances of O’Neal’s name changed to Mahomes’.
We’ve previously investigated other fictional stories about celebrities that some internet users have mistaken for fact, such as a rumor that rapper Snoop Dogg was denied access to his first-class seat on a flight because he is Black.
