Is the video of actor Mel Gibson criticizing Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass fake? No, that's not true: When Lead Stories tested the original recording first uploaded to the internet in the summer of 2025 during the wave of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, six tools ruled that the footage of Gibson was real. His statements were also covered by the media.
The claim appeared in a community note (archived here) on X published below a Sept. 17, 2026, post by the @Melgibsonact account, saying the following:
This post shares an AI-generated video on an account impersonating Mel Gibson, who has no social media accounts.
This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: X.)
The 56-second video attributed the following to Gibson:
Gavin Newsom (the 40th Governor of California - L.S.) and Karen Bass (the 43rd mayor of Los Angeles - L.S.) have already proven their incompetence and poor leadership during the Los Angeles wildfires. Now, as we experience rampant lawlessness and civil unrest, it's never been more clear: they're unable to respond effectively and responsibly during calamity. Whether it's sheer incompetence or outright malevolence, the reality is stark. California is in a state of turmoil, and I asked my fellow Angelenos why are Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass still in office? How much more of their destructive decision-making masquerading as leadership are we going to tolerate? It's time to take back our community and our state, and put the power and the privilege in the hands of competent leaders whose goals are to protect us and the way of life this nation was founded upon, and promises to offer. That's all.
As Lead Stories previously reported, the actor doesn't have his own accounts on X or any other platforms. However, this specific video in question did not originate from the impersonator reusing the actor's name in the handle ("@Melgibsonact").
The video was first published in a June 15, 2025, episode of the Raymond Arroyo's podcast "Arroyo Grande" (archived here) posted on YouTube (Gibson's soundbite begins at the 00:47 mark.)
The same segment also appeared in a short (archived here) on the same platform, where it was published by the same show, also in the summer of 2025.
Lead Stories downloaded and submitted the video to three online AI detectors: Hive Moderation, Sightengine and FauxLens. They did not find the proof that the clip of Gibson was generated by AI:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
(Image source: Sightengine.)
(Image source: FauxLens.)
When Lead Stories submitted a thumbnail from the video to ZeroGPT, it found that the image was "97% REAL":
(Image source: ZeroGPT.)
When Lead Stories submitted the same thumbnail to the OpenAI verification tool, it did not find the invisible watermark confirming the AI presence (archived here):
(Image source: OpenAI.)
Lead Stories also uploaded the first 19 seconds of the original video to Gemini and asked it to look for SynthID (archived here), an invisible signal embedded in it by Google AI tools to identify AI-generated content. Here is the conclusion:
(Image source: Gemini.)
Additionally, Gibson's statements were covered in 2025 by The Independent (archived here) and Fox News (here and here, archived here and here), which further confirmed that the video in question was real.
