“The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.
News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable.
When I was in high school, we carved a hole into some sort of melon and one of my friends took it into the bathroom for $5. I doubt he did anything to it, but who knows. He was like 16.