Over LeBron James' 22-year career, the star National Basketball Association player became the world's sixth-highest-paid athlete, according to Forbes in May 2025.
But the Los Angeles Lakers' power forward's success also made him the target of many false rumors. The advent of artificial intelligence-generated content only intensified this problem. This led James' lawyers to take unprecedented action.
On July 24, 2025, 404 Media, which covers technology, reported that James' lawyers had served AI-generation company FlickUp a cease-and-desist letter demanding they stop making images and videos of James in various compromising situations, including a video of James pregnant and one of him homeless. As a result, FlickUp, which runs the AI-generation tool Interlink AI, which was responsible for the videos, told its users that they would "remove all realistic likenesses from the site." The move had resulted in three accounts being deleted by Instagram.
However, Snopes has been verifying and debunking claims about James since at least 2005. Here are 15 of them.
