Does a video show a naked Hunter Biden chasing and catching a distressed woman in a hotel hallway and dragging her back to a room? No, that's not true: Although the man in the video and Hunter Biden both have back tattoos, their tattoos are not the same. On June 8, 2024, the video began to circulate with unsupported English-language captions falsely claiming the video shows Hunter Biden. The video surfaced on Chinese porn and gore sites as early as May 21, 2024. The Chinese-language captions with the earliest postings make no reference to Hunter Biden.
The video appeared on X in a post (archived here) by Melissa Dawn @GenXNewsOnX on June 9, 2024. The post was captioned:
Make sure to share this far and wide because the media won't. This is Hunter Biden and pedo drug addicted depravity. His father hides it for him. The Biden's are monsters.
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Jun 11 17:55:44 2024 UTC)
Text captions on the video say:
THIS IS HUNTER BIDEN
MEDIA SILENT
The video has a timestamp that does not show the date, only minutes and seconds. It is a second-hand recording of another screen playing the video -- this is apparent from the unsteadiness, the angled border and light reflections on the screen surface. As the video begins, the TikTok handle @harland_scarbrough shows. This video is not visible on that channel. In the lower right corner of the video is the watermark from kaotic.com, a video-sharing website similar to the now-defunct website LiveLeak in that it features graphic videos of sex, gore, violence and potentially illegal acts. The video was posted on kaotic.com by user Wicked on June 7, 2024, with the title:
Prostute Leaves Job In Progress
Using Google Lens reverse image search and reviewing the "exact matches," the results come back in two distinct groups -- posts made in the past two or three days, at the time of writing on June 11, 2024 (going back to about June 8, 2024), and posts made 20 days earlier (about May 22, 2024). The earliest editions of this video Lead Stories identified were posted on May 21, 2022, on Telegram and 91cgc.com.
The Chinese captions translated by Google made no indication of a connection to Hunter Biden nor do they mention him. One of the captions referred to "a gangster" attacking the woman in the video, while the other described a brutal rape.
On June 8, 2024, former WWE pro wrestler Val Venis posted the video on X with the caption:
Ummmmmm..... first P-diddy, and now Hunter Biden.
The Venis post was embedded in a June 9, 2024, The People's Voice article titled, "Hunter Biden Caught 'Assaulting and Dragging' Young Girl Into Hotel Room in Leaked Security Camera Footage." The article does not present any evidence to back the claim that the man in the video is Hunter Biden, nor is there any explanation about the purported "leak" of security camera footage, or any indication where or when this purported assault happened.
The article does mention Biden's back tattoo of the Finger Lakes Region in upstate New York and suggests that it is the same as the tattoos on the man in the video. In the Lead Stories composite image below, four small screen captures from the 91cgc.com video and one detail image from an April 10, 2024, Daily Mail article about Biden's back tattoo are shown here for comparison. The hotel security video is grainy and the lighting is inconsistent, but it is clear that it does not show the same Finger Lakes tattoo, or the same man.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with 91cgc.com and dailymail.co.uk screenshots taken on Tue Jun 11 20:37:01 2024 UTC)
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims about Hunter Biden can be found here.
Other Lead Stories debunks on claims concerning The People's Voice stories are here.
