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The US Department of Justice’s release of an extra 3 million pages of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has opened the door to intense speculation about his vast network of rich and powerful contacts.
The documents, which contain images, videos, text messages and emails, have also triggered a wave of disinformation, including AI-generated images of a young Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, alongside Epstein.
In one doctored image, Mamdani is pictured as a child in a photograph with his mother, Mira Nair, as well as Epstein’s collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube, ran these images through Google Gemini after spotting inconsistencies in the photo. The AI chatbot detected a SynthID on the image — an invisible watermark developed by Google to identify AI-generated content.
The photo has a “DFF” watermark on it. The Cube conducted a reverse image search and matched it with an X account called @DumbFckFinder, which has a “parody account” disclaimer on it.
It’s spread multiple images of politicians pictured with Epstein in unrealistic contexts, such as one depicting Epstein and the late English theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, with Hawking scuba diving into a “secret tunnel”.
Along with the images, some social media users shared outlandish theories, for instance, suggesting that Epstein was Mamdani’s father while seeking to draw up similarities between their facial characteristics.
Mamdani’s name was mentioned in the Epstein files five times. However, these mentions were connected to newspaper clippings rather than any potential wrongdoing. There is no evidence that Epstein ever corresponded with or wrote about Mamdani.
Many of these AI images were shared on social media alongside an email sent by US publicist Peggy Siegal to Epstein in October 2009, which featured in the files.
In her message, Siegal referenced Mamdani’s mother while speaking about the afterparty for her film “Amelia”, which was hosted at Ghislaine Maxwell’s New York townhouse in 2009. The messages suggest that Epstein did not attend the screening.
Mamdani would have been 17 at the time of the screening, not a baby, as depicted in some of the AI-altered images.
The account also seemed to acknowledge the number of views the images garnered online as they went viral. “Damn you guys failed. I purposefully made him a baby.”
On 4 February, Mamdani responded to the images, stating, “at a personal level, it is incredibly difficult to see images that you know to be fake, that are patently photoshopped and AI-generated, and yet can reach across the entirety of the world in an era of misinformation.”
Were you fooled by these photos?
Another image claims to show Epstein with British politician and leader of the far-right Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and was picked up by the Wrexham Labour Party group on X after it was shared widely online.
The image shows Epstein and Farage with their arms around each other in a living room setting. It was shared on X and Threads with captions including “I won’t be voting for Farage or Reform” and “A picture paints a thousand words.”
The Wrexham Labour Party group has since deleted the image.
There are no reports of Epstein and Farage meeting or directly corresponding in the files.
Mentions of him are limited to newspaper clippings and discussions of him in the context of UK politics by Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist who regularly conversed with Epstein about Europe’s far-right parties, according to the tranche of documents.
Farage told Sky News Australia that he “never met Epstein and never went to the island”. He was referring to Little Saint James, commonly nicknamed “Epstein Island” — the private island in the US Virgin Islands owned by Epstein, which the financier allegedly used as a base of operations for underage sex trafficking.
AI-generators were unable to conclusively determine whether the image is AI-generated.
The Cube ran the photograph through Google Gemini to look for traces of a SynthID, but it found that it did not contain a watermark. Meanwhile, other AI detection tools did not offer a clear-cut response.
Indicators of AI generation include inconsistent lighting that does not match the shadows on Epstein and Farage’s faces, as well as the fact that their shirts align unnaturally.
Macron targeted by Russian bots
Elsewhere, the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, a body affiliated with the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, identified the “Matryoshka” bot network spreading doctored French newspaper covers linking French President Emmanuel Macron to Epstein.
One cover mimicking French daily Libération asks, “What was Emmanuel Macron doing 18 times on Epstein’s island when he was France’s Minister of the Economy”.
There is no evidence of Libération publishing this story.
Although Macron is named in the files, there is also no evidence that Epstein and he ever communicated directly, with most of the mentions of him references by third parties. There is no evidence he was implicated in Epstein’s sex crimes.
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