Did Arnold Schwarzenegger wear a T-shirt that said, "I didn't vote for the McFelon"? No, that's not true: The photo appearing to show that scene has been altered. The original photo showed Schwarzenegger wearing a plain black T-shirt without any slogan on it. The photo was taken in March 2024, at the 2024 Arnold Sports Festival UK, which was held in Birmingham, England. The picture circulating on social media has also been cropped to remove the person Schwarzenegger was posing beside, professional bodybuilder Phil Heath.
The altered image appeared in a post (archived here) on X on November 16, 2024. It was simply captioned:
Nice!
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 16:10:41 2024 UTC)
The picture on X shows Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, actor and professional bodybuilder, wearing a black T-shirt. A slogan on the shirt reads, "I DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE McFelon" but the lettering appears flat and does not follow the contours of the shirt -- suggesting that this image was edited.
The process to find the original unedited version of this photo was not straightforward, Google Lens reverse image search (archived here) only returned duplicate copies of the edited image. (pictured below):
(Source: lens.google.com screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 16:22:26 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories used Adobe Photoshop to cover the slogan on the shirt and tried the search again (below left). This time Google Lens surfaced an Alamy stock photo (archived here) that appears to be from the same day and location as the photo on X, but is a different photo. The Alamy collection of images from the event (below right) (archived here) do not include the photo in question, but offer the name of the event, The Arnold Sports Festival 2024.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with Google lens and Alamy.com screenshots taken on Tue Nov 19 16:58:49 2024 UTC)
A DuckDuckGo image search (archived here) including the name of the event and sponsor, Panatta, surfaced a composite image published on fitnessvolt.com (pictured below) Here is the image in question with Schwarzenegger is wearing a plain black T-shirt with no slogan.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with DuckDuckGo.com screenshots taken on Tue Nov 19 16:58:49 2024 UTC)
The March 18, 2024, article on Fitnessvolt.com (archived here) included some embedded Instagram posts. One March 16, 2024, post from @arnoldsportsuk features a carousel of photos, including the full uncropped and unedited image of Schwarzenegger and Phil Heath together -- the bodybuilding legends have each won the title of Mr. Olympia seven times.
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 17:13:09 2024 UTC)
Additional Lead Stories fact checks including claims about Arnold Schwarzenegger can be found here.
