List of Premature Obituaries - R

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• Ronald Reagan (former US President), in the CNN.com incident. CNN also included fragments of Reagan's life history in a premature obituary of Fidel Castro in the same incident. Reagan died on June 5, 2004.
• Lou Reed (musician), by numerous US radio stations in 2001, caused by a hoax email (purporting to be from Reuters) which said he had died of an overdose.
• Adam Rich: the television actor was reported to have been murdered in a 1996 tribute issue of Might magazine. It was all an elaborate hoax by the magazine's editor Dave Eggers in collusion with Rich, and was intended to satirize the media exploitation of stars who die young.
• Raymond Roth, a 47-year-old man from Massapequa, New York, was reported missing on July 28, 2012 after having gone for a swim off Jones Beach. After an extensive search turned up nothing, Roth was initially presumed dead. He was found alive and well a few days later, apparently having faked his own death to claim on life insurance policies. As of August 2012, Roth and his 22-year-old son are both facing numerous charges related to the incident.
• Amnon Rubinstein, Israeli academic and retired politician, whose death was announced in 1999 by Knesset (parliamentary) speaker Avraham Burg following a hoax telephone call. Rubinstein was in hospital at the time for a minor complaint.
• Bertrand Russell: the philosopher was reported dead in the Japanese press in 1920 when he was suffering from pneumonia. Some sources say the reports were a deliberate form of revenge by Japanese journalists whom Russell had refused to meet due to his illness. His supposed death may also have been reported in The Times. (It is also sometimes said that by way of apology, The Times allowed Russell to pre-write his own obituary for publication on his actual death. But the obituary does not read as if it could be by him; the confusion may be that in 1937 he wrote an imaginary Times obituary for his own entertainment, which is briefly quoted at the end of his obituary in the New York Times.) Russell died in 1970.
• Bob Ruthman: Ruthman, an author who was a roommate of journalist Andy Rooney during their time at Colgate University in the 1930s, was falsely reported dead by TMZ after experiencing a heart attack and being prematurely pronounced dead while at Rooney's funeral in November 2011. Ruthman was later revived, and the numerous news reports indicating his death were corrected within two hours. Ruthman died nine days later.