STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.
Is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump sitting next to each other on a private jet an authentic picture? No, that's not true: The image of the financier convicted of prostitution crimes and the former president of the United States is not authentic. It is an AI-generated image, as an online detection tool showed. Epstein and Trump were photographed together multiple times over the years and some of those photos are for sale online, but this particular photo is fake.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on January 8, 2024. The caption was:
This is a picture of two guys on a private jet, going to a private island, that didn't know each other.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Jan 11 18:28:29 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories did a reverse-image search of the photo on Google Lens (archived here) and found one that was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on November 26, 2023, on the account @AnnieForTruth here (archived here). Hive Moderation, an AI-generated detection site, rates this image 100 percent AI-generated, as the screenshots below show. This image, posted months before the Facebook post, did not become more real in the months between. Hive Moderation rated the Facebook post .1 percent not-AI-Generated, or 99.9 percent AI-generated.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with Facebook and X screenshots taken on Thu Jan 11 15:17:37 2024 UTC)
The above Google Lens search of the photo returns other posts on social media but no matches for the image on reputable news sites. Were this an authentic photo, it would have been published on national and international news sites, yet none exist as of January 11, 2024.
The photo agency Getty Images has multiple images for sale (archived here) to the public of Trump with Epstein but none are of the two of them seated together on a plane.
Previously private Epstein-related materials were released on January 3, 2024, per the New York Times (archived here), but did not include any photos of Trump with Epstein on a plane together. Epstein killed himself in 2019 while in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He had previously been convicted of prostitution-related charges.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on Jeffrey Epstein can be found here and others on Donald Trump can be found here.
Updates:
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2024-01-12T01:47:11Z 2024-01-12T01:47:11Z Revised to distinguish between the prostitution and sex trafficking charges facing Jeffrey Epstein.
