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No Evidence

Did Robert Francis Prevost moonlight as "Bobby Prev", a "celebrated jazz trombonist" in Chicago who "headlined several jazz festivals in the '70s and '80s"? No, that's not true: The archives of the Chicago Tribune, which has long provided detailed coverage of jazz, contain no celebrations or even mentions of such a musician. Similarly, a search of the GoogleNews index of thousands of news sites shows no references to a trombonist named Bobby Prev. The posts making the claim provide no documents, links or witnesses to verify the claim and online photo analysis tools say the photo is highly likely to be an AI-concocted fake.

The claim appeared in a May 9, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) and several other social media posts under the title "We now have a jazz trombonist in the Vatican." It opened:

Meet "Bobby Prev." I already like him.

"Vatican City, May 8, 2025 -- Before ascending to the papacy as Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost led a surprising double life: acclaimed theologian by day, and celebrated jazz trombonist by night. Known in Chicago's music circles as "Bobby Prev," he headlined several jazz festivals in the '70s and '80s with his signature mellow tone and soulful improvisations. Though he laid down the horn to follow his priestly calling, insiders say he still keeps a trombone in his Vatican apartment." - Thanks to Lacey Mauk for sharing this.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri May 9 17:11:40 2025 UTC)

Lead Stories searched the archive of The Chicago Tribune, which is the first newspaper known to use the word "jazz" in print, in July of 1915, to describe music. No mention of "trombonist Bobby Prev" is found (archived here) in The Tribune's archive service, Newspaper.com, which contains Tribune news articles from 1849 through today's date:

(Source: Newspapers.com screenshot by LeadStories.com)

Lead Stories searched for "trombonist Bobby Prev" on GoogleNews, which indexes thousands of news sites and pages, finding no mentions (archived here) let alone celebration of such a player, listings of him headlining jazz festivals or reviews of his performances.

Evidence photo is a fake

Lead Stories used the University of Buffalo's Deep-Fake-O-Meter to see if the supposed picture of "trombonist Bobby Prev" is real or the product of generative AI. The analyzer found there was a 100 percent likelihood (report archived here) that the image was AI generated. Analysis by HIVE Moderation, a tool belonging to a private company, also found the image was likely fake. Their report looked like this:

(Source: HIVEModeration.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)

Readers can find more Lead Stories fact checks about Pope Leo IV here.