NEW YORK – In a move that has drawn sharp condemnation, political commentator Candace Owens has resurrected one of history’s most toxic and thoroughly debunked antisemitic conspiracy theories: the blood libel. On February 2, 2026, Owens alleged that B’nai B’rith, a prominent Jewish philanthropic organization, engages in the “ritualistic killings” of Christian children for Passover, a baseless accusation that has been used for centuries to incite violence against Jews.
This is not the first time Owens has promoted this narrative. She has previously claimed, without evidence, that a “Frankist cult” of Jews “still participate” in ritual murder today. Her latest assertions center on a distorted retelling of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old Catholic girl in Georgia. Owens falsely claims that Phagan was raped and ritually murdered by Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent with ties to B’nai B’rith. These claims are a modern fabrication, unsupported by the historical record.
Contrary to Owens’s narrative, Mary Phagan was never alleged to have been raped by the police, prosecutors, or investigators at the time. The accusation of ritual murder is also a fabrication by Owens; even Leo Frank’s accusers did not make such a claim. While Frank was convicted in a trial marred by antisemitism and mob pressure, he was widely believed to be innocent. The trial judge himself expressed doubts about the verdict, and Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, after a courageous and exhaustive review of the case, commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison. Slaton’s actions, which effectively ended his political career, were born from a deep conviction that an innocent man was about to be executed. In a powerful statement in 1915, Governor Slaton declared, “Two thousand years ago another Governor washed his hands of a case and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that Governor’s name has been accursed. If today another Jew were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice.”
Historians now widely concur that the prosecution’s key witness, Jim Conley, was the actual murderer—an assessment shared by Conley’s own lawyer at the time. Frank was later lynched by a mob, a tragic end to a case fueled by prejudice, not facts.
The blood libel that Owens is now peddling has a long and bloody history. It predates Christianity, with early forms of the accusation leveled against Jews for allegedly murdering Greek children. In medieval Europe, the lie morphed into the grotesque claim that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for making Passover matza. This falsehood was used to justify countless pogroms, tortures, and massacres of Jewish communities.
The absurdity of the charge is underscored by its explicit rejection by multiple Popes. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254), and Pope Gregory X (1271–1276) all investigated and unequivocally condemned the blood libel, affirming that the claims were false and unsupported by any evidence. Indeed, in thousands of years of accusations, not a single piece of physical evidence—no ritual objects, no liturgy, no remains—has ever been found to substantiate the claim. This stands in stark contrast to cultures like the Aztecs, where human sacrifice was a real and documented practice, leaving behind extensive archaeological evidence.
For the blood libel to be true, it would require a conspiracy of silence among millions of Jews across centuries and continents, a notion that defies logic and basic human behavior. No credible whistleblower has ever emerged because there is nothing to blow the whistle on. The charge is a phantom, appearing only when Jews are politically vulnerable and social stress is high, recycled for new audiences by those who seek to inflame hatred.
Furthermore, the accusation runs directly contrary to the core tenets of Judaism. Jewish religious law explicitly and strictly forbids murder and the consumption of any blood, even animal blood. Jewish texts are among the most scrutinized religious documents in the world; if a ritual involving human sacrifice existed, it would have left a trace. It has not.
The only “confessions” to blood libel in history were extracted under brutal torture, and even then, many accused Jews refused to confess to a crime they did not commit. Owens’s revival of this lie is a deliberate act of hate, recycling debunked propaganda to vilify a people. By targeting B’nai B’rith, a philanthropic organization dedicated to mutual aid and civic engagement, she reveals the malicious intent behind her words. The claim that Jews ritually murder children is a lie so exhausted that its only remaining function is to inflame hatred where facts have failed.
