Does an authentic photo show Canadian Liberal Party leadership candidate Mark Carney with Jeffrey Epstein in a pool? No, that's not true: Multiple online artificial intelligence detectors judged that this image was almost certainly AI generated. Lead Stories found no real photos of Carney and Epstein together after consulting online news archives and image searching tools.
The image appeared in a post (archived here) on X on January 27, 2025, under the caption "Well we'll just more lies from this corrupt want to be unelected liberal." The on-screen title of the photo said:
Well we'll well. What do we have here. Mark Carney and Jeffrey the pedo. He said he had nothing to do with him 🤔🙄
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 18:25:17 2025 UTC)
This post provided no evidence to support the assertion that this is an authentic photo of Carney with Epstein in a pool.
AI detection
Lead Stories used various AI detection tools to determine that the image in the post was likely fake.
A tool on Hive Moderation, a website that detects AI generated content, said the image is 96.8 percent "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content." A screenshot appears below:
(Source: Hive Moderation screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 19:11:22 2025 UTC)
The tool on Illuminarty said there was a 65.6 percent "AI Probability" for the image:
(Source: Illuminarty screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 19:18:39 2025 UTC)
Media Forensic Lab
Lead Stories also ran the image through AI detection tools at the University at Buffalo's Media Forensic Lab, which focuses on "the forensic analysis of digital media." Together, these tools are called the DeepFake-O-Meter. The following screenshot shows the results after the image was processed through 14 separate detectors connected to the site to analyze it. Eight of the tools found it was likely AI generated:
(Source: DeepFake-O-Meter screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 19:32:32 2025 UTC)
Google searches
Using Google Lens, a reverse image search found only one exact match to the image of Carney and Epstein and that was in the social media post itself. It was found nowhere else as of this writing on January 28, 2025. A screenshot of the search appears below:
(Source: Google screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 19:32:32 2025 UTC)
A Google News search (archived here), using the terms "Mark Carney AND Jeffrey Epstein," found nothing to support this claim.
The closest apparent link between Carney and Epstein is an August 2013 photo republished January 10, 2025, in the Toronto Sun (archived here). It shows Carney standing next to Epstein's confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison (archived here) for sex trafficking girls for Epstein. Lead Stories found no pictures of Carney with Epstein. The picture from the Sun appears below:
(Source: Toronto Sun screenshot taken on Tue Jan 28 20:27:37 2025 UTC)
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims involving Jeffrey Epstein can be read here.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks involving Canada can be found here.
