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Former US President Donald Trump and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein allegedly had a friendly relationship at a time. The latter was often spotted frequenting Trump's Mar-a-Lago club. Recently, an image showcasing Trump and Epstein sitting together on a couch coddled by allegedly underage girls is going viral on the internet.
However, the picture is not real. The photograph is an AI-generated image. Despite the availability of pictures and videos in which the two can be seen together, this is not one of them. The viral image showcases various characteristics and inherent glitches frequently found in AI images. Multiple versions of the photograph were circulated in May of this year.
The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein image was proven fake a few months ago
On July 11, Twitter user @GuntherEagleman tweeted:
"Want to help stop human trafficking...? Vote for Donald Trump!"
In response to this tweet, @MarindaVannoy1 asked why politicians and celebrities were not discussing this. As a quote reply to @MarindaVannoy1's question, @RadioActivistRX tweeted the AI-generated image and stated:
"You tell me, why aren’t you speaking out against this?"
Here's the entire thread:
This quote retweet amassed over 185,000 views at the time of this article's writing. Readers added a context note to the tweet that confirmed that the image was AI-generated.
The context note talked about how the image contained obvious glaring defects and provided multiple links. One of the links was a Lead Stories fact-check article that debunked the image in early May. The other was an NPR article on how to identify AI-generated images.
This image showcased former US President Donald Trump and convicted s*x offender Jeffrey Epstein hanging out with each other and two allegedly underage girls.
Epstein's lack of legs is the most glaring of defects in the image. Donald Trump's fingers were also unnaturally long. Epstein's left hand resting on one of the girl's legs was disfigured and unnatural, and so was the cluster of hands around Epstein's right shoulder. There are three hands around Epstein's shoulder area, two of them are disfigured, and none of them seem to belong to anybody.
Fact-checking website lead stories debunked this image alongside other AI-generated images of Donald Trump partying with young girls in early May. According to the website, this image first appeared on May 7, as proven by multiple reverse image searching websites. If it was original, tabloid media archives should have been present.
The images were uploaded to Hive Moderation AI-generated content detection tool, an AI detection portal, where it received a score of 4.1. A modified, highly saturated version of the image also came into circulation in May 2023.
Yet, another version of the image came into circulation in the same month. Here, the faces of the subjects had been changed, and so was Epstein's grin and head position. New faces were included in this version, and some of the hands on Epstein's shoulder from the earlier image were absent.
Although this image looks realistic compared to the first one, this one also contains a few AI-induced deficiencies. A new blonde woman behind Trump has a blob for a body. Her right hand is noticeably disfigured, and so is the left hand of a newly appeared man behind Epstein.
Trump once thought highly of disgraced pedophile, Epstein
Despite the aforementioned images being AI-generated, there are real images of the pedophile and the former United States president together. Epstein's former girlfriend and then-socialite, now convicted s*x offender Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced the two, banking on Trump's connection with her father, British media tycoon Robert Maxwell.
In 2002, Donald Trump spoke to the New York magazine regarding Epstein. He said:
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy.”
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side," he added.
However, their relationship became irreparably damaged after a property dispute that dated back to 2004, when Trump allegedly outbid Epstein and resold a property that Epstein wanted to buy.
In March 2023, Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, claimed that Jeffrey called Donald Trump a "crook" in an unaired clip of Steve Bannon's interview with the convicted pedophile. Mark claimed that his now-deceased brother sent him a now-defunct Dropbox link to the interview clip back in 2019.
