Does a photo circulating on social media really show Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to be attorney general, jogging in her underwear? No, that's not true: The image has been manipulated. The original picture portrayed a young woman at the University of Arizona's 2009 "Undie Run," where stripped-down students ran around campus to raise cash for charity.
The photo claiming to show Bondi appeared in a post (archived here) on X on November 21, 2024. The caption read:
ladies and gentlemen
Pam Bondi
This is how the post looked on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Nov 22 16:44:00 2024 UTC)
In the above photo, Bondi's face has a lighter tone than the rest of the body and the neck seems disproportionately short. Lead Stories ran it through a reverse image search on Google Lens and found that the same picture had appeared in 2013 in the Orlando Weekly's "Happytown" column under the title "Pam Bondi Exposed?" (archived here), and also used in more recent posts from various sources as shown in the search below:
(Source: Google Lens screenshot taken on Sun Nov 24 05:17:37 2024 UTC)
The piece is a lighthearted take on Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer's meeting with Bondi, then attorney general of Florida, on February 1, 2013. It says Dyer asked Bondi if she'd care to take part in Orlando's iteration of Cupid's Undie Run (archived here) later that month. "We stared her down as she giggled," the columnist wrote.
Cupid's Undie Run is a nationwide fundraiser for a children's charity that features runners romping through cities in their skivvies. This is how the "Happytown" column looked on the Orlando Weekly's website at the time of writing:
(Source: Orlando Weekly screenshot taken on Sun Nov 24 07:52:13 2024 UTC)
"Happytown" did not provide a credit, date or any other information for the photo. However, the Google Lens search yielded a copy of the same image in a Reddit thread (archived here), where one commenter labeled it a fake and provided an archived link to the original. That photo is dated November 5, 2009, and was uploaded to Flickr a day later by the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the newspaper of the University of Arizona, in a collection titled "Arizona Undie Run 09":
(Source: Flickr screenshot taken on Sun Nov 24 08:00:52 2024 UTC)
The young woman in this photo is wearing the same sports bra, clutching the same cell phone and running next to the same young man as seen in the photo that supposedly shows Bondi. However, it was taken more than three years before Bondi's image appeared in the Orlando Weekly. This indicates that Bondi's face was pasted onto the runner's body.
Lead Stories was not able to find the original image on the Daily Wildcat's website at the time of writing, but a separate article affirmed that the University of Arizona students took part in an Undie Run to raise funds for charity on November 5, 2009 (archived here).
It is not clear why the Orlando Weekly decided to publish the fake photo of Bondi. However, it's worth noting that "Happytown" is a column written in an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek tone. It gave the same treatment to Orlando Mayor Dyer in its coverage of his participation in the 2013 Undie Run (archived here), pasting his head onto the body of Slovak underwear model Radoslav Vanko:
(Sources: Left: Orlando Weekly screenshot taken on Sun Nov 24 8:33:06 2024 UTC; right: Underwearnewsbriefs.com download on Sun Nov 24 7:13:05 2024 UTC)
The image of Vanko can be viewed in a retrospective article published in 2015 on underwearnewsbriefs.com (archived here). It also appeared on Facebook in February 2013 (archived here), about the same time "Happytown" wrote about Dyer's undie-running ambitions.
More Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to politics can be read here.
