Is a video of a woman tied up in a kitchen begging for food from the Epstein files? No, that's not true: The clip is from a comedy sketch included in a 2010 review of a "Star Wars" movie. The woman in the footage is an actor named Jocelyn Ridgely, who played the character Nadine in multiple "Mr. Plinkett" "Star…
Is an email from the Epstein files with a joke about Mitt Romney's wife and Barack Obama real? Yes, that's true: The email appears among the Epstein files on the Justice Department website. It was sent to Jeffrey Epstein by Emirati businessman and billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem in November 2012. The claim appeared in a post and image (archived…
Did Donald Trump post an image of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool showing him and Jeffrey Epstein together? No, that's not true: Lead Stories manually reviewed his account on Truth Social for the period between June 1 and June 26, 2026, and found no evidence to support the claim. While images of the pool have been a recurring topic among…
Did Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and chairman of Block, join the AI company Anthropic? No, that's not true: There have been no news announcements that Dorsey has joined Anthropic. After the true announcement that Andrej Karpathy, the co-founder of OpenAI, was joining Anthropic, a trend of copycat joke announcements popped up on social media. Among the copycat posts…
Did President Donald Trump make a social media post calling a "60 Minutes" correspondent "Nora O'dumble," "dirty" and "nasty" while mentioning Jeffrey Epstein and his ballroom? No, that's not true: No such post exists on his social media accounts. Misspellings and other details in the "post" also do not make sense. The claim appeared in a post made on Facebook…
Is King Charles "dying of Kuru," (a rare disease linked to cannibalism), after decades of "child meat banquets"? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that the king has been diagnosed with Kuru as of the time of publication. He has announced he was diagnosed with cancer. The viral video making this claim does not cite any sources or…
Did the Russian state-owned news agency TASS accurately report that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is listed as a child trafficker in the Epstein files? No, that's not true: Zelensky's name does appear in 39 documents in the Epstein records on the U.S. Department of Justice website. However, none of those documents have anything to do with child trafficking. The claim…
Did President Donald Trump actually post on Truth Social attacking media personality JD Delay? No, that's not true: A screenshot claiming that Trump called out Delay is fake. No such post exists on Trump's Truth Social profile, and Trump has not mentioned Delay on other social media profiles. The claim appeared in a post by the Delay's account @JdDelay5150, on…
Do new documents from the Department of Justice Epstein files reveal that Erika Kirk used to work for Jeffrey Epstein? No, that's not true: A search of the publicly available DOJ file of Epstein investigation documents did not find any results containing evidence that the late Charlie Kirk's widow ever worked for convicted child abuser Epstein. The post making that…
Is a photo that shows Melania Trump smiling and standing next to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell authentic? No, that's not true: Online detection tools flagged the image as likely digitally altered and likely AI-generated. One rated it as 97 percent likely to be digitally edited. The claim appeared in an April 10, 2026, post on X.com by the account…
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