Does a viral image actually prove that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz posed on camera with Jeffrey Epstein? No, that's not true: The earliest versions of the picture contained an invisible watermark, pointing to Google AI. Case and document numbers visible on early versions of the image did not match any records in the U.S. Department of Justice's Epstein Library.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by the @ricwe123 account on Sept. 5, 2026. The caption read:
So here we have the German chancellor and one of his former buddies......
This is what the image shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ricwe123 on X.)
The picture claimed to show German politician Friedrich Merz (archived here), who became chancellor on May 6, 2025, hugging Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous American financier and convicted sex offender whose August 10, 2019, death in a Manhattan prison cell was ruled suicide (archived here).
Earlier examples of the claim shared on social media in July 2026 (for example, here and here; archived here and here) named a specific date when the alleged photo was taken. The German caption read:
Die Blackrock Veranstaltung, Investor Day 2014 - fand exakt, am Dienstag, dem 17. Juni 2014 in New York statt.
As translated to English by DeepL, it meant:
The BlackRock event--Investor Day 2014--took place on Tuesday, June 17, 2014, in New York.
On that day, the international investment firm (archived here) put up a press release (archived here) about the event, but it did not mention Merz or Epstein.
Lead Stories did not find evidence confirming that both Merz and Epstein were in attendance on that particular occasion. Furthermore, Merz did not become a BlackRock employee until later (archived here), when, in January 2016, he was hired for the firm's German operations.
The early versions of the image shared on social media in July 2026 also contained the digits implying that the image originated from official U.S.-based sources:
Case No.: A-2014-017 Document No.: D-2014-0831.
A Google search for documents mentioning either of the two numbers across American government website (archived here) did not generate any matches.
Searches for such numbers across nearly 3.5 million pages concerning investigative inquiries into Epstein's activities (archived here) disclosed by the U.S. Department of Justice did not show the supposed documents:
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
A textual search for Merz's name across the same DOJ database produced a single result:
(Image source: Department of Justice.)
But that file (archived here) did not contain the image in question, or its description, or any implications of any improprieties on the part of the current German chancellor -- the PDF document only alleged that Merz attended an international forum for senior policymakers, scholars and entrepreneurs (archived here) in 2008.
Lead Stories submitted an early version of the picture to Google's Gemini and asked it to look for a SynthID watermark (archived here), an invisible signal embedded by Google AI tools to identify AI-generated content, and here is the conclusion (archived here):
(Image source: Google.)
A search for Merz's and Epstein's names on Google News (archived here) did not show any credible reporting confirming the authenticity of the supposed photo of the two.
The claim that is the focus of this article was also reviewed by Correctiv.org and DPA.
This was not the first case when a fabricated image purporting to capture Merz with Epstein in the same frame went viral on social media. Another notable example involved swapped faces in the picture (archived here) that originally showed (archived here) Epstein with Donald Trump, who was still a businessman at the time.
