<b>Exposing Einstein’s Retrofit of General Relativity</b>

This brief challenges the historical narrative surrounding Einstein’s prediction of Mercury’s precession anomaly. It presents a case that the precession correction in General Relativity was not a natural consequence of the theory but a mathematical retrofit to align with an already suspect dataset. The analysis exposes how Einstein’s reformulation of GR conveniently produced the missing correction term, casting doubt on whether spacetime curvature was a necessary innovation or a flexible tool for data fitting.