Story Of Dentist Who Removed Ex's Teeth Was A Hoax: Why We Shouldn't Have Been Fooled

Remember that great story last week about the Polish dentist ex-wife pulling all her ex-husband's teeth out under anesthesia and he didn't realize what happened until he got home? Yeah, well it's just that - a great story. A hoax. And we should've known -- the clues were all there.

But kudos to Erin Tennant at MSNBC.com for exposing the Anna Mackowiak story that first appeared on the Daily Mail's website as a hoax.

As the original story goes, Mackowiak, a dentist, ripped out her ex-boyfriend Marek Olszewksi's teeth as revenge for his dumping her. The incident was attributed to authorities in Wroclaw, Poland.

The story has more than 75,000 Facebook likes and had 166 comments on the Daily Mail website.

I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions, Anna Mackowiak reportedly told the Daily Mail. But when I saw him lying there I just thought, 'What a b-----d.'

Which brings us to our first clue.

This quote sounds like something conjured up by the people at the news satire website The Onion. Or the humorist Andy Borowitz. It's like a movie with unrealistic dialogue. Hard to believe a Polish dentist actually said the quotes that were attributed to her.

It gets better when the Daily Mail quotes the supposedly jilted Marek Olszewski, who said his new girlfriend dumped him because of his newly toothless self.

I knew something was wrong because when I woke up I couldn't feel any teeth and my jaw was strapped up with bandages. She told me my mouth was numb and I wouldn't be able to feel anything for a while and that the bandage was there to protect the gums, but that I would need to see a specialist. I didn't have any reason to doubt her, I mean I thought she was a professional. But when I got home I looked in the mirror and couldn't f------ believe it. The b---- had emptied my mouth. The new girlfriend has now left me saying she can't be with a man without teeth. And I'm going to have to pay a fortune on getting indents or something.

Again, these are pretty outlandish quotes and some of the language seems unrealistic. For instance, saying the new girlfriend instead of my new girlfriend. Saying indents instead of implants is another red flag. Even if Marek were real, Daily Mail reporter Simon Tomlinson should have used parantheses to indicate what Marek intended to say, even if the words came out wrong. Or maybe that was just part of the ruse.

Tennant got to the bottom of the story. She found Wroclaw police were not investigating such a case, nor was Poland's Chamber of Physicians and Dentists.

And when she contacted Tomlinson, he said he drew a blank when asked where the story came from.

I've drawn a bit of a blank, he said in an email to Tennant. The (Daily) Mail Foreign Service, which did the piece for the paper, is really just an umbrella term for copy put together from agencies. My news desk isn't sure where exactly it came from.

It's clear where this story came from: Thin air. That's not to say Tomlinson fabricated the story himself. He may have gotten duped just like the rest of us.

The least the Daily Mail can do is acknowledge the error, as other websites that carried the story did, such as The Huffington Post, and ourselves.