Did an authentic photo show Vice President Kamala Harris with Jeffrey Epstein, embracing at the beach? No, that's not true: Lead Stories ran the image through AI detection tool True Media, which found "substantial evidence" the image was generated using AI, with 100 percent confidence. A reverse image search does not offer results older than mid-July 2024, almost five years after Epstein was pronounced dead by suicide on August 10, 2019.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on July 24, 2024. It opened:
This is why we can't see the client list
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jul 30 18:05:38 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories ran the image through True Media, an AI detection tool, which found substantial evidence that the photo was manipulated, with 100 percent confidence for AI generated image detection and reverse search analysis. True Media suggested that the image was likely created using Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image AI model. USA Today, Snopes and other fact checkers also found the image to be altered.
Here are the findings of the tool:
(Source: True Media screenshot taken on Tue Jul 30 18:37:34 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search (archived here) does not offer results older than mid-July 2024, almost five years after convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was pronounced dead on August 10, 2019.
Another digitally altered image showing the pair together was previously debunked by Lead Stories. There is no evidence that the image preceded Epstein's death, or that the two were ever photographed together.
At the time of writing this fact check, USA Today and Snopes had reviewed the same claim.
More Lead Stories fact checks about Kamala Harris can be found here.
