Claim: A video on Facebook shows the Chief Minister of Punjab Maryam Nawaz drunk.
Fact: The video has been altered, and shared without context to claim Maryam Nawaz is intoxicated.
On 16 June, a Facebook user posted a video showing the Chief Minister of Punjab Maryam Nawaz Sharif who appears to be responding to a media person while intoxicated.
The caption of the post says: “😂 #hklahoriمریم نواز شراب پی کر بغیر میک اپ میڈیا کے ہتھے چڑھ گئ”
Translated from Urdu: [Maryam Nawaz has been caught by the media, drunk and without makeup.]
The hoarse sound of her voice, along with the blurry quality of the video suggest that she may have been drinking.
Fact or Fiction?
In April 2022, the same video of Nawaz was shared online with the claim that she was drunk. At the time, Soch Fact Check investigated the video and found the claim to be false.
Zeeshan Malik, who is now special assistant to the chief minister, shared the original video on X (formerly Twitter) in March 2022. According to Malik, her voice is rough as she had given two speeches on that day, which affected her throat before the video was shot, and not because she was drunk.
Comparing it with Malik’s video, Soch Fact Check noticed that Maryam Nawaz’s hand gestures and eye movements are slower in the video shared in the viral claim. Her eyes seem to hardly open. The image-quality is also more grainy, and the camera seems to be closer to her face. The zoomed in angle, therefore, crops her hands out from the video partially, further giving the impression that she is intoxicated. However, in the original video by Malik— which Soch Fact Check has verified — a wider angle clearly shows her vigorous hand-gestures while her eyes are wide open.
Moreover, in the original video on X, the chief minister’s appearance is consistent with her usual appearance in public. Her earrings are visible, and she evidently has makeup on, contrary to the viral claim which states that she is bare-faced.
A screenshot from the original video showing Maryam Nawaz wearing her makeup and earrings
This is not the first time doctored or altered images or videos of Maryam Nawaz have surfaced online. In April 2024, Soch Fact Check debunked an AI-generated photo which claimed to show her in a knee-length pink dress at a police passing parade. In another claim, a doctored photo showed her holding photos of Ziaul Haq and Gen Asim Munir in the Punjab Assembly.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that a post claiming to show a video of a drunk Maryam Nawaz drunk, is false.
Virality
The video received nearly 9 million views on Facebook.
The same user shared the video on YouTube here. It was also shared on YouTube here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: An old video of Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif has been altered and shared out of context to show that she is drunk. The claim surfaced in 2022, and was debunked by Soch Fact Check then too.
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Background image in cover photo: Dawn
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