After Mark Carney won the race to succeed Justin Trudeau as the leader of Canada's Liberal Party in March 2025, a photograph began to spread online purporting to picture him sitting on a beach with Ghislaine Maxwell, the incarcerated Jeffrey Epstein associate, and actor Tom Hanks.
For example, the image appeared on X on March 11 (archived):
(x / @@GioBruno1600)
"Why was Canada's new Liberal woke Prime Minister Mark Carney on Epstein Island with Ghislaine Maxwell & Tome Hanks !!!," the post read. As of this writing, it had amassed more than 760,000 views and 40,000 likes. The image was shared on X as well as on Facebook.
However, the photograph is fake and generated by artificial intelligence. It has circulated since at least Feb. 14, 2025, and the original image included a Grok logo watermark on the bottom right corner. Grok is X's generative artificial-intelligence tool:
(X / Grok)
Running the image through AI detector SightEngine confirmed the image was made with AI, with 99% certainty.
Canada's snap federal election
The image appeared in a heated electoral context in Canada.
Carney, a former central banker, won the leadership race of Canada's Liberal Party on March 9, 2025, six weeks after then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned following nine years in office. Carney, who had never held elected office, became prime minister on March 14. The Liberals have held a minority government since the 2021 federal election, forcing Trudeau to form alliances with other parties to legislate.
Liberals had lost favor in the polls, with sinking approval ratings for Trudeau. However, the popularity of Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilièvre, a proponent of small government, peaked in early January, and began to drop immediately after U.S. President Donald Trump took office. Trump has threatened Canada with annexation as the 51st state in the U.S., and imposed heavy tariffs on it. The backlash was immediate, leading Canadians to boycott U.S. products, as well as to turn on Poilièvre, who many perceived as similar to Trump:
On March 23, 2025, Carney triggered a snap election, scheduled for April 28, 2025. The next day, polls suggested Liberals and Conservatives were neck-and-neck in the polls.
A conservative effort to link Carney to Maxwell
It is in this context that rumors Carney knew Maxwell, a convicted child trafficker, began to circulate. On March 11, 2025, The Daily Mail, a right-leaning publication, published authentic photographs of Carney standing near Maxwell at what appeared to be a music festival in Oxfordshire in 2013. In 2013, Carney was starting his tenure as governor of the Bank of England, which lasted until 2020. Further, an anonymous source reportedly close to Carney and his wife told a columnist for The Toronto Sun, also a right-leaning newspaper, that Maxwell had gone to the same high school as Carney's wife's sister. However, the same source insisted that Carney and Maxwell were not friends.
Snopes reached out to Carney to ask for more details about his ties to Maxwell. We will update this story should he respond.
It appears that Canada Proud, an advertising group close group close to Carney's Conservative opponent, Poilièvre, has been buying advertisements on Facebook suggesting links between Carney and Maxwell, without providing evidence. Snopes was able to verify that Canada Proud ran at least three adds linking Carney to Maxwell between March 12 and March 23, 2025:
Snopes contacted Poilièvre's campaign asking whether it endorsed these ads and will update the story should we receive a reply.