That video said to show Trump selecting a young girl at an Epstein party? It's AI
The president appears to be making his sordid choice in the presence of Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier who was found dead in his cell in 2019 while facing charges of sex trafficking of minors. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping provide Epstein with these girls.
This video appeared online at a moment when Trump is being criticised by his own supporters for how he has managed the Epstein affair. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to make sensational revelations about the financier, including publishing a list of clients of Epstein's prostitution ring, whom he allegedly blackmailed.
Since then, the president has been trying to backtrack on his promises. The US Justice Department published a memo on July 7 claiming that no 'incriminating client list' had been discovered.
'There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,' the memo reads.
An AI video created from a real photo
The video, however, is fake. We ran it through a reverse image search (learn how by using our handy guide). It seems as if it was based on a real photo published by the British tabloid The Sun. This image shows Trump next to Ghislaine Maxwell. There's also a third person in the image, but you can only see part of their hair in the video.
The rest of the video, where you can see the young girls, was entirely created by AI.
There are a few clues that helped us determine this. First of all, the wall is grey in the original photo but blue in the video. The door to the right in the original photo is gone in the video. And there are no children in the original photo.
We ran the image through InVID-We verify, a tool that helps identify deepfakes. It concluded that the image of the young girls in the video is 94% likely to be AI-generated.
The video is emblematic of a new generation of deep fakes that have appeared in recent months. To make them more convincing, fake videos have been generated from real photos using AI, which makes them harder to detect as their details are closer to reality. To verify them, you have to find the original photo that it was based on and then look for inconsistencies between the photo and the video.
A fake video published by 'BlueAnon' social media users
The fake video of Trump seems to have largely been spread by left-leaning social media users. One pro-democratic social media user, for example, accused MAGA activists (Make America Great Again, Trump's slogan) of supporting a 'paedophile rapist' just because 'they thought he would hurt black and brown people more than themselves".
BlueAnon encompasses left-leaning conspiracy theories, many of which arose during the 2024 American presidential election. It is a play on the colour 'blue' used to represent Democratic wins on an electoral map and 'QAnon", conspiracy theories championed by Trump supporters. The spread of this video suggests the movement remains active.
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