Millions fooled by fake images allegedly taken from Epstein files

Social media users are spreading AI-generated and otherwise manipulated images of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, saying they found them in the freshest batch of the Epstein files.

NewsGuard, a media-reliability rating service, has so far identified seven such images on various social media platforms. That was enough to collectively garner more than 21.2 million views on X alone.

To be fair, a lot of influential politicians and celebrities, including former US President Bill Clinton, appear next to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in photographs.

But some of them had nothing to do with the late financier. The problem is that certain manipulators want them to be implicated in the Epstein files – just like, for instance, Donald Trump, who is mentioned or referenced in more than 5,300 documents, according to The New York Times.

As we know, last week, the US Department of Justice released millions of documents related to the investigations into Epstein, who was convicted of solicitation of a minor in 2008 and died in custody in 2019 while facing federal charges of sex trafficking minors.

Digital sleuths and journalists are still digging into the files, and each day, something new comes up. But certain conservative social media users claim that the batch includes images of prominent people that simply aren’t there and present manipulated content as proof.

For example, three images allegedly show Epstein posing with Mamdani, then a child, including two that also show Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, an award-winning filmmaker. Users sharing the images suggested that they pointed to a connection between Mamdani’s family and Epstein’s sex crimes.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted one of the images and stated, “Grok says this photo of the young future New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani with Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and others is real.”

Grok, which is a notoriously unreliable and biased chatbot, said the photo was authentic, and Jones’ post garnered 1.5 million views in one day.

However, the images are AI-generated fakes. NewsGuard reviewed the images using Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, which determined that they contained a “SynthID,” which is an invisible watermark that shows when content is created by Google’s Nano Banana Pro, the company’s AI image generator.

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Other users have also been sharing an image of an email allegedly sent to Epstein by former South Carolina governor Haley. The message reads: “I have 2 babies with me. Can you arrange a flight for me? Can’t leave them at home.”

British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos shared the claim in an X post, which was viewed 426,000 times.

But there is no such email among the newly released DoJ files, and there is no evidence that Haley – who served as US Ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s first term – ever asked Epstein to arrange a flight for her, NewsGuard said.

More images, including a fake photo showing Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado seated in a group with Epstein, are being posted each day, and a lot of users believe they’re authentic – when they’re not.

That’s not entirely surprising. A survey conducted by NewsGuard last year found that an average of nearly half of Americans believed at least one false claim about major stories covered in the news.

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