Did the family of Epstein's late survivor Virginia Giuffre, Stephen Colbert or Elon Musk spend millions of dollars to file a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other people? No, that's not true: A federal court database showed no such case filed by Giuffre's surviving brother, and credible media organizations did not publish any reports of such a case. The claim spread through a network of foreign-based sites that publish made-up stories with multiple variations, with a different celebrity in each, to generate revenue from ad traffic.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on February 12, 2026. It opened:
BREAKING: VIRGINIA GIUFFRE'S FAMILY FILES $4 MILLION LAWSUIT AGAINST PAM BONDI AND 28 POWERFUL FIGURES -- FINAL LETTER UNEARTHED In a stunning legal escalation that has sent shockwaves across the United States and beyond, the surviving family of Virginia Giuffre has taken an unprecedented step within the last 48 hours. On the morning of February 10, 2026, $4 million was wired directly to the Court of Justice as the full filing fee and initial bond for a sweeping civil lawsuit. The defendants named in the complaint: Pam Bondi and 28 other influential individuals--politicians, financiers, legal professionals, and high-profile figures whose names have repeatedly surfaced in connection with Jeffrey Epstein's network, flight logs, redacted documents, and Giuffre's own memoir Nobody's Girl.
This is what the image attached to the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Feb 20 00:55:50 2026 UTC)
The "Lovely Smiled Baby" page (archived here) that published the claim was managed from the U.S.:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from Facebook)
The contact section of that page also listed a Brooklyn address, but that, however, was followed by two words in Vietnamese that meant, as translated by DeepL, "United States":
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from Facebook)
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from DeepL)
The earliest version of the claim found by Lead Stories was published on Facebook on January 30, 2026 (archived here) by a page named "Chaos-Daily-247" (archived here). Its transparency tab showed it is managed from Vietnam:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from Facebook)
The Vietnam connection is significant, since fact-checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories is a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning so-called Viet Spam here.
The earliest post on Facebook identified by Lead Stories shared a link (archived here) to an English-language "Triforce247" website (archived here) that purported to function as a news outlet but didn't have an "About" page, lacked minimal editorial transparency about the team behind it and had a Brazilian IP address, according to the WHOIS domain lookup tool.
The article's title read:
A2 BREAKING: A Letter, a Lawsuit, and $10 Million That Shattered the Silence.
The article continued:
On the morning of January 31, a single transaction sent shockwaves far beyond a courthouse ledger. According to filings reviewed by multiple observers, a sum of $10 million was transferred directly to the Court of Justice by the family of Virginia Giuffre, setting in motion one of the most explosive legal actions in recent memory.
Within hours, whispers turned into headlines.
Within a day, public opinion fractured.
And within twenty-four hours, a wall of silence that had stood for years began to crack.
At the center of it all: a final letter, reportedly written by Giuffre shortly before her death, now cited as a cornerstone of a sweeping lawsuit targeting Pam Bondi and more than 60 other influential figures. All allegations remain unproven, and those named have not been found liable by any court. Yet the impact of the filing was immediate and undeniable.
This was no longer private grief.
This was a public confrontation.
Unlike a normal news report that documents the past or provides live reports on the present, that January 30, 2026, piece described the events of the next day, January 31, 2026.
A search (archived here) on Facebook showed multiple variations of the claim. Those nearly-identical posts included different amounts of money purportedly paid in court fees and a different number of Bondi's alleged co-defendants. In some cases, it was not Giuffre's family who filed and/or funded the supposed lawsuit, but other persons, for example, comedian Stephen Colbert (archived here) and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk (archived here).
(Source: Lead Stories screen recording of Facebook)
Later, on February 11, 2026, the same site published at least one more story (archived here) repeating the claim.
Lead Stories looked up media reports for the period between January 31 and February 20, 2026 (the day of this writing). A search on Google News for the search terms "'Virginia Giuffre' family files 'lawsuit against Pam Bondi' letter" (archived here) showed no relevant matches confirming the existence of the alleged lawsuit.
The late Virginia Giuffre (archived here) was one of the women who spoke publicly against Jeffrey Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell and then-Prince Andrew (archived here).
On February 10, 2026, which was one of the supposed dates of the case's filing, her surviving brother, Sky Roberts, held a press conference (archived here), but for a different reason: He spoke in support of a new bill (archived here) that would erase the statute of limitations in federal civil cases brought by survivors of sexual abuse.
The amount of the purportedly paid court filing fees, measured in millions of dollars, didn't make any sense, either. In reality, filing fees are significantly lower. For example, most fees (archived here) listed on the website of the nation's oldest (archived here) federal court, covering the Southern District of New York, are significantly below $1,000.
The only exception is the Cuban Liberation Civil Filing Fee that exceeds $7,000, but it is only applicable (archived here) to situations when families whose property in Cuba was seized by the Fidel Castro government decades ago want to sue international companies profiting from the use of such properties. That is clearly unrelated to Giuffre's case.
When Lead Stories searched Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), which is a database of federal court materials, it showed zero cases filed by or on behalf of Sky Roberts between January 31 and February 19, 2026:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of PACER)
Lead Stories published a primer on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam'".
