Does a real image show Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wearing workout clothes in her kitchen? No, that's not true: The image is a manipulated screenshot from a video posted to her Instagram account, digitally altered to make her outfit appear as tight-fitting activewear. In the original video, Ocasio-Cortez is wearing a brown sleeveless dress with white polka dots.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @panda6967 account on X on Sept. 3, 2026. It read:
AOC shows off her 'revenge' body 😳
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @panda6967 on X.)
The manipulated screenshot is from a video (archived here) posted to Ocasio-Cortez's Instagram account (@aoc) on Aug. 22, 2026. The full video is embedded below:
Original vs. manipulated
The manipulated screenshot can be seen about two minutes and 40 seconds into AOC's video. The images appear side by side below. Along with the background being the same in both images, Lead Stories highlighted in red a strand of hair along her face and a bandage on her arm:
(Image sources: post by @aoc on Instagram and post by @panda6967 on X.)
Image analysis
Lead Stories ran the image showing AOC in workout clothing through the Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool, which returned an aggregated score of 61.9%, indicating that it is likely to be AI-generated. The greater the tool's confidence that the content contains AI, the higher the score.
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
