Was Oprah Winfrey's private jet on Jeffrey Epstein's island 11 times? No, that's not true: There is no proof that Winfrey's private plane was ever on the Caribbean island of convicted sex offender Epstein. Little St. James is only 75 acres and does not have a runway for Winfrey's private plane, or any planes, to land there.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @X_Global_tv account on X on Sept. 24, 2026. It read:
Oprah Winfrey's private jet was on Epstein's island 11 times... What happened to all the girls who were kidnapped from her school in Africa?
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @X_Global_tv on X.)
In 2024, Lead Stories debunked this exact claim about Winfrey's jet having landed on Epstein's island 11 different times. The claim has gone viral again, but there is no new evidence showing that Winfrey's jet ever landed there.
The Department of Justice's Epstein Library -- the only publicly searchable database of Epstein files, last updated on Sept. 11, 2026 -- contains no record of Winfrey or her private plane visiting Epstein Island 11 times. Lead Stories searched for "Oprah Winfrey Jet," "Oprah Winfrey plane" and "Oprah Winfrey island" and did not find any matching results. These screenshots of the Epstein Library search results were taken at the time of writing:
(Image source: Department of Justice Epstein Library.)
(Image source: Department of Justice Epstein Library.)
(Image source: Department of Justice Epstein Library.)
No runway
Business Insider published images (archived here) of the small island that do not show a runway. Epstein would fly into the international airport on St. Thomas and take a helicopter to Little St. James, as The New York Times (archived here) reported.
The post also asks "What happened to all the girls who were kidnapped from her school in Africa?" There were no girls kidnapped from Winfrey's school in South Africa. Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Nigeria's Chibok Government Secondary School for Girls in 2014, as The New York Times reported (archived here).
The AI detector Hive Moderation concluded that the image of Epstein and Winfrey was 89.9% likely to have been created with AI, as shown in the image below:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Other fact checks
This claim was also investigated by USA Today.
