Does an authentic photo show Kamala Harris posing arm-in-arm with Sean "Diddy" Combs? No, that's not true: Combs' face has been pasted onto the body of the man who was standing next to Harris when the photo was taken in 2001 by Ron Galella as can be seen on Getty Images. The man in the original photo is TV host Montel Williams, who dated Harris more than 20 years before the altered photo with Diddy's head was posted on social media. The head came from a photo taken by Steve Granitz in 2020.
The picture appeared in a post on X (archived here) on September 16, 2024. The caption read:
🚨🇺🇸 BREAKING: DIDDY TAKEN INTO FEDERAL CUSTODY
This is how the post looked on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on September 17 Tue 13:07:20 UTC 2024)
Combs' face is in sharper focus than the rest of the photo, raising questions about the picture's authenticity. Lead Stories found the original photo on the Getty Images website. It shows the original (archived here) with a description that identifies the man in the center as TV personality Montel Williams. He was posing with his daughter Ashley on his right and Harris on his left at a charity event at Century City, a Los Angeles neighborhood, on May 18, 2001.
Here is how the photo looked on the Getty website at the time of writing:
(Source: Getty Images screenshot taken on September 17 Tue 14:38:37 UTC 2024)
Williams confirmed he was Harris' former beau in a post on X on August 7, 2019 (archived here). At the time the 2001 photo was taken, Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, was a 36-year-old lawyer working for the San Francisco District Attorney's office.
The image of Combs' head appears to have come from a photo (archived here) taken at a party before the Grammy Awards on January 25, 2020, which is available on the website of the WireImage agency. Features such as the shape of his eyes and mouth, his hairline and the way the light falls on his face are identical to those in the doctored photo on X.
(Source: WireImage screenshot taken on September 17 Tue 16:57:33 UTC 2024)
Lead Stories tested the photo on X with the AI detection tools at TrueMedia.org (see report here). The site's Universal Fake Detector Analysis found "substantial evidence" that the image had been created by one of "a variety of autoregressive or other popularly used types of generative models" with 67 percent confidence.
Combs, a hip-hop artist and entrepreneur, was arrested in New York City on September 16, 2024. The charges against him include "racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution," according to a statement posted on the X account of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on September 16, 2024 (archived here).
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to Vice President Kamala Harris can be found here.
