A rumor that circulated online in May 2025 claimed a photo showed Bruce Reinhart, a U.S. magistrate judge for the Southern District of Florida, on an airplane receiving a foot massage from Jeffrey Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Politico reported Reinhart signed off on the warrant allowing federal agents to search President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 8, 2022. Months later, in June 2023, photos from the search made public in an unsealed indictment showed boxes, allegedly filled with documents of a classified or otherwise sensitive nature, stacked in locations like a ballroom stage and in a bathroom next to a toilet and shower.
For example, numerous users shared this rumor on Facebook (archived), iFunny.co (archived), Instagram (archived), Truth Social (archived) and (archived) X (archived). Many of the posts displayed a text caption reading in part, "They are all connected. All of them." Memes also showed text misspelling Maxwell's name, reading, "Judge Bruce Reinhart who signed the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago and Giselle Maxwell."
(Image courtesy of @CharlieK_news/X)
However, the picture did not show Reinhart with Maxwell on an airplane. As The Associated Press and other news media outlets reported, an unknown user — possibly a person using the handle @what.i.meme.to.say — doctored the photo by combining two different images.
Reuters reported its fact-check team conducted a reverse image search, showing the original photograph featured Epstein, a convicted sex offender, not Reinhart. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in New York, according to an autopsy.
(Image courtesy of Snopes Illustration)
The picture of Reinhart shown in the doctored image came from a 2017 post on his personal Facebook profile. As of this writing, he or another person managing his account either removed the post or changed its privacy settings, making it inaccessible to the public. Snopes did not locate a working archived version of the post's page.
The inspiration for a user to create the fake picture possibly originated from Reinhart once serving as a "defense attorney on behalf of individuals connected to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein," according to Politico. Citing the Miami Herald, Politico reported Reinhart once defended "pilots for Epstein, his scheduler and a woman who had been described by some of Epstein's victims as his sex slave."