What was claimed
A picture shows Donald Trump in his 50s dancing with a 13-year-old girl on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.
Our verdict
This image isn’t real. It has the hallmarks of having been created by artificial intelligence.
Picture of Donald Trump with teenage girl isn’t real
A picture which appears to show Donald Trump in his 50s with a young teenage girl is being shared online, but it isn’t real.
The image, which has been circulating in the UK on both Instagram and Facebook, includes overlaid text saying: “Photo of Donald Trump at Epstein’s private island Dancing with a 13 year old girl.
“Trump was in his 50’s when this was taken. what kind of man does that? [sic].”
This image has circulated online for several years, and is one of a number of debunked AI images of President Trump, which often falsely depict him with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
But as Full Fact, and other fact checking organisations have confirmed before, this picture isn’t genuine and does not show a real event on Epstein’s “private island”.
It has hallmarks of having been created by artificial intelligence (AI), with errors in the depiction of body parts of people in the picture.
These include the girl’s right forearm, which is unnaturally elongated, and her thumb (which can be seen as her hand disappears into President Trump’s armpit), which is distorted and lacking detail. As our guide to spotting AI-generated images explains, AI often makes mistakes with generating hands.
The hand of the man in the background on the left of the picture is also distorted, and appears to have six fingers.
Professor Hany Farid, of the University of California, Berkeley, who specialises in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis, and is Chief Science Officer at GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on preventing malicious threats from generative AI, told the Associated Press (AP) that there is evidence that the image is an AI-generated fake.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Mr Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, also confirmed to AP in 2023 that the image was not real.
But while this image is faked, there are real photographs and video footage of the two men together.
It’s important to consider whether content that you see on social media could have been created digitally or manipulated with AI before sharing. Our guide on spotting AI-generated images can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because this image has hallmarks of being created with AI, and experts say it isn’t genuine.