Did French President Emmanuel Macron publish a clip purporting to show Jeffrey Epstein kissing Melania Trump? No, that's not true: Neither his social media accounts nor news reports confirmed that. The video consisted of a digitally modified photo taken from the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice DOJ, altered to insert Melania Trump's face.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published on April 8, 2026. It opened:
Macron posted this today. That's Melania's first pump, Jeff Epstein.
The post included a video appearing to show Epstein kissing Melania Trump. This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ItsDeanBlundell on X.)
The 15-second clip consisted of a single still image and did not include any screenshots of Macron's accounts.
Lead Stories manually reviewed the content that the French president posted on X (archived here) and Instagram (archived here) on April 8, 2026, but did not find the alleged post.
Epstein's international connections to powerful figures have been extensively covered by media organizations worldwide. Had the claim been true, news organizations would have reported it -- but a Google News search (archived here) for April 8-9, 2026, found no such reports.
The earliest example of the image found by Lead Stories dates to Feb. 5, 2026, when it was posted (archived here) on Facebook under the caption that, in part, read:
#MelaniaTrump DISCLAIMER: Digitally altered photo #parody
That account's self-description (archived here) contained a satire/parody label and referred to its content as "memes":
(Image source: Facebook.)
The image from Facebook contained a serial number that looked similar to those used to index materials from the Epstein library on the DOJ website:
(Image source: Facebook.)
A search for that number across DOJ files, however, showed no matches:
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
Yet, when Lead Stories removed the last three digits of the file number, the search returned several batches of documents from DataSet 10. Then, after manually scrolled through those files, Lead Stories found four visually similar pictures:
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
In February 2026, at least two British newspapers, The Telegraph (archived here) and Metro (archived here), published an image from the above sequence.
None of these DOJ images confirmed the authenticity of the picture from social media. Unlike that image, photos from the Department of Justice website did not show the face of the woman. None of them portrayed Epstein wearing a ring, and his hands were captured in positions different from what was seen in the image examined in this fact check.
Online AI detector Illuminarty said that the probability of that picture containing AI was 95.2%:
(Image source: Illuminarty.)
Another similar tool, AI or Not, concluded that the odds of that were 95%:
(Image source: AI or Not.)
A close look revealed that Epstein's hand appeared deformed, as if two of his fingers merged, and that pointed to AI, too:
(Image source: Facebook.)
