In November and December 2025, online users reposted a rumor alleging a picture showed U.S. first lady Melania Trump kissing the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his cheek. The image circulated following President Donald Trump's signing of a bill to release case files related to Epstein's sex crimes.
For example, in several Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived) posts from late November and early December, users shared a meme with the image reading, "What a travesty! Trying to say our First Lady had ANYTHING to do with this Epstein guy!" The caption then featured a flushed face emoji, ending with, "....never mind."
(Steven Clair/Facebook)
Other users shared the purported photo, including posts with the same caption, on Bluesky (archived) Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and X (archived).
A Snopes reader also emailed us asking about the supposed picture, "Is this a genuine photo of Melania Trump kissing Epstein?"
In short, the image was fake and generated with artificial intelligence (AI).
Examining the AI-generated photo
In the AI-generated photo of Melania Trump and Epstein, Epstein's facial features — in particular the size of his lips — did not match any authentic pictures of him.
No news media outlets ever credibly reported the photo as being real.
AI-detection tools including the AI or Not website and the University of Buffalo Media Forensics Lab's Deepfake-O-Meter both found mixed results when determining the picture's authenticity. The AI or Not website displayed a misleading result of "likely real." The Deepfake-O-Meter's detection models mostly wrongly found a low likelihood of AI. Tools that claim to detect AI in photos, text and videos often display unreliable results.
Finding the origins of the fake picture
On Aug. 12, the Lead Stories fact-checking website reported about the inauthentic nature of the same picture, tracing its roots from an August X post (archived) displaying a YouTube video thumbnail image. That YouTube video's title read, "Trump GOES NUTS After Stephen Colbert AIRS Melania's UNSEEN Epstein Secrets On Live TV."
(@AnnieForTruth/X)
As of December 2025, YouTube searches located no popular videos with the same title and thumbnail image, possibly indicating the user in control of the channel — or YouTube — removed the video or channel. One video with very few views displayed the same fake photo, while another video showed a similar AI-generated picture of the first lady kissing Epstein.
For further reading, we previously reported about an authentic picture from 2000 showing Donald Trump and the future first lady, then Melania Knauss, posing with Epstein and his confidant, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as another photo of Trump and Knauss with Maxwell. We also published an article about a rumor that Melania Trump once modeled partially nude on an airplane owned by Epstein, as well as a claim she was an escort before meeting Donald Trump at a party hosted by Maxwell.