Clippers Refuse To Deny That Blake Griffin Beat Up Justin Bieber

Earlier this week, writers and editors across the United States became aware of a dumb story about Blake Griffin beating up Justin Bieber in a Hollywood Starbucks. The version linked here, which we believe to be the original and which inexplicably appears to have been shared 418,000 times on Facebook, was so fantastically implausible, so impossibly stupid, that in a rare show of collective good sense pretty much all the writers and editors across the United States decided to ignore it.

Perhaps because they did, it just kept going, occasionally oozing up into the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of seemingly sensible people. Irritated, we decided to write something about it, and reached out to several flacks for the Los Angeles Clippers for comment, hoping that at least one of them would issue an authoritative denial that would allow us to kill the story.

After two rounds of emails and a mildly testy follow-on, though, all of which made clear that our sole interest was in debunking a ridiculous story, we haven't heard back. At this point we can only assume that Blake Griffin actually did beat up Justin Bieber in a Hollywood Starbucks—or at least that the Clippers believe he did.

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