Stephen Hawking was 'Right'.

Stephen Hawking’s Black-Hole Area Law Observationally Confirmed
Hawking’s black-hole area theorem, also known as the second law of black hole mechanics, states that the total horizon area of a classical black hole cannot decrease over time.
In 1971, Stephen Hawking proposed the black-hole area theorem, which set off a series of fundamental insights about black hole mechanics. The theorem predicts that the total area of a black hole’s event horizon — and all black holes in the Universe, for that matter — should never decrease. The statement was a curious parallel of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or degree of disorder within an object, should also never decrease. The similarity between the two theories suggested that black holes could behave as thermal, heat-emitting objects — a confounding proposition, as black holes by their very nature were thought to never let energy escape, or radiate. Hawking eventually squared the two ideas in 1974, showing that black holes could have entropy and emit radiation over very long timescales if their quantum effects were taken into account.