In December 2025, online users shared an alleged photo of Donald Trump from years before he became U.S. president, posing with his hand on the neck of a young Black girl. According to text accompanying the image, the FBI removed the purported picture from newly released case files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On Dec. 23, Instagram user @rabbisgreat posted (archived) the supposed photo in a brief video clip. The post's caption began, "FBI didn't wanted us to see this photo."
Users shared the alleged picture on Bluesky, Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), TikTok (archived) and X (archived).
In short, the photo was partially fake; it was manipulated from an authentic picture of Trump with his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump. Whoever created the misleading image either prompted an artificial-intelligence tool to generate the Black girl in place of Ivanka Trump or used other image-editing tools to achieve this result.
The Getty Images media-licensing website hosted the unaltered photo, taken by photographer Ron Gallela at New York City's Plaza Hotel in 1991.
(Image courtesy of Getty Images)
Snopes privately contacted @rabbisgreat via an Instagram message to ask if the creator made the fake photo with an AI tool, and if so, by using which tool. We will update this article if we receive further details.
For further reading, we previously reported about how FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi spent nearly $1 million in overtime pay for personnel to redact the Epstein files.