Does a viral video really document Donald Trump pointing at minor girls as they walk by him and Ghislaine Maxwell? No, that's not true: several anomalies betray the artificial intelligence (AI) origin of the video. A leading deepfake expert says the video used "motionizing" software, which is widely available, to turn authentic stills into video of something that did not happen.
The video was reposted several times, including a July 12, 2025 Facebook reel (archived here) published on the 5.11gladiator page under the caption:
Donald Trump
The initial frame of the video looked like this on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of the Facebook reel on the 5.11gladiator Facebook page.)
Photo forensics expert Prof. Hany Farid said shadow angles, especially around the two minor girls added into the scene, are the tip-off that it's fake. Trained as an engineer and computer scientist, Farid is the developer of a physics-based method for spotting deepfakes. His analysis of the video:
"... this is an AI-generated video. More specifically, the result of image/text-to-video generation ... This type of fake is particularly compelling because it starts with a real image meaning that, in this case, the facial identity of Trump and Maxwell are quite good.
There are tell-tale motion artifacts suggesting that the video is fake and there are several places where the shadows cast from Trump onto the wall in young girl are physically implausible.
A screenshot of the girls is included below.
Real photo starts the video
The clothes and pose of Trump and the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell match exactly those seen in still photos of a Gucci perfume launch party published in November 2019 by The Sun and credited to Alpha Press, a photo agency. Trump, in the same outfit, is seen in other photos of that April 29, 1997 party in his penthouse atop Trump Tower New York. Those photos can be seen in the online catalogue of Getty Images. Neither photo agency offers video of the party.
Minor girls not found in search.
Extracting a screenshot of the girls from the Facebook reel, Lead Stories conducted reverse image searches to determine if they showed up in any other photos and could be thus identified. No matches were found through Google (archived here) or the 76 billion images indexed by TinEye (archived here).
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of a portion of the Facebook reel on the 5.11gladiator Facebook page.)
None of the online galleries of the party photos shows either of the minor girls seen in the video, although that only proves they aren't in the online photo collections, not that they weren't photographed or were not there.
'AI' watermark on some versions
The same video (archived here) was posted July 13, 2025 to the @JeffBower4444 account on X.com. In that version, the video carries a watermark: "@ cursedaicrafter" as is seen in the embedded version of the post seen below:
Trump and Maxwell at the Gucci Envy Perfume Launch Benefit For Cancer Patients in New York City in 1997. pic.twitter.com/2zHGWLfE1I
-- Jeff Bower (@JeffBower4444) July 13, 2025
Motionizers abound
A simple Google search (archived here) shows there are more than a dozen publicly available motionizing tools, some of them free, that can be used to create deepfake videos from still images:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of a Google search.)
Readers interested in more Lead Stories reporting about deepfakes will find a collection here.
