Did Kamala Harris hit a 13-year-old girl with a car and leave the scene in 2011? No, that's not true: The "KBSF-TV" news station cited in the social media post does not exist in San Francisco and the website that posted the article was created two weeks before the post appeared. The San Francisco Police Department told Lead Stories they had no records of such an incident and believed the claim had no merit. The image used in the article is from a car crash that happened in 2018 and was published then by major news organizations.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 3, 2024. It said:
BREAKING: A 26-year-old woman from San Francisco, Alicia Brown, alleges that Kamala Harris was involved in a 2011 hit-and-run accident that left her unable to walk.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 17:05:41 2024 UTC)
The 4:39-minute video opens with shaky footage of what appears to be a street in hilly San Francisco and the audio, "It happened on the evening of June 7, 2011." Eventually it shows a woman describing an accident and accusing Harris of driving the car that hit her. This video was originally published in an article on the website kbsf-tv.com, but was deleted as of this writing.
The website ksbs-tv.com was just registered on August 20, 2024, as this search for information about the domain name shows (archived here). A Google search for that news station (archived here) yields zero matching results. According to the Federal Communications Commission list of full-service TV stations by call sign, KBSF-TV does not exist as of publication date, as this screenshot of a search of the FCC list shows:
(Source: FCC website screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 17:50:22 2024 UTC)
Officer Paulina Henderson, a San Francisco Police Department public information officer (archived here), told Lead Stories via email on September 4, 2024, that a search for the incident "turned up with negative results," and said, "We believe there is no merit to this incident."
In June 2011, Harris was the newly elected attorney general of California (archived here), with offices in San Francisco. There are no credible reports (archived here) of Harris being involved in an accident in San Francisco in June 2011.
At 13 seconds into the video an image of a shattered car windshield and law enforcement officers standing in the background is shown. A reverse image search on Google (archived here) showed the photo was published in January 2018 by news organizations including the Detroit Free Press (archived here) and USA Today (archived here). Here is a screenshot of the image from the post that is the focus of this fact check:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 17:25:11 2024 UTC)
Here is the image in the Detroit Free Press on January 17, 2018:
(Source: Detroit Free Press website screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 17:32:23 2024 UTC)
AI-generated ratings
Lead Stories entered the video into the DeepFake-o-Meter AI detection tool at the University at Buffalo. Four of the seven tools said the video was more likely than not to be AI generated, as this screenshot shows:
(Source: DeepFake-o-Meter website screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 18:41:23 2024 UTC)
(Source: DeepFake-o-Meter website screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 18:49:21 2024 UTC)
Resemble AI rated the audio as fake, as this screenshot shows:
(Source: Resemble AI website screenshot taken on Wed Sep 4 18:55:45 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories has reached out to the California Highway Patrol for comment on the claim and we will update the story when a response is received. We also contacted the Harris campaign for comment.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning Kamala Harris can be found here.
