U.S. forces seized Maduro and Flores during an overnight mission in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, on Jan. 3. The operation reportedly left dozens of Venezuelan and Cuban officers dead. According to The Associated Press, U.S. officials were holding Maduro and Flores at the the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, while they awaited trial.
One X user who shared the image, which showed a woman with dark brown hair and glasses wearing a black blazer and maroon top seated in front of a microphone, wrote, "Those who call on the U.S. to protect women's rights should keep this image in mind. If the same had happened to Donald Trump's wife, human rights activists would have reacted strongly across the world."
(X user @YasirAgha1234)
The image also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and LinkedIn (archived). Snopes readers wrote in, asking whether it actually showed Maduro's wife.
The woman in the image was not Flores, as evidenced by authentic photos from the Venezuelan first lady's capture by the reputable photo agency Getty Images and court sketches from her and Maduro's first appearance on Jan. 5, 2026. We were unable to definitively determine whether the image had been digitally edited or generated with artificial intelligence. Because of this, we've left this claim unrated.
According to the authentic photos, Flores did not wear glasses and had light blond hair. Flores has had blond hair since at least 2019, according to Getty Images. She and Maduro both wore what appeared to be prison clothes during the Jan 5. appearance, consisting of a blue t-shirt over an orange inner layer.
According to The Associated Press, Flores did have bandages "on her forehead and right temple" during her Jan 5. court appearance, with her lawyer Mark Donnelly reportedly saying she suffered "significant injuries" during her capture. The alleged photograph of Flores showed her with bandages on her left temple. The court sketches did not show Flores with a black eye as seen in the image that falsely claimed to portray her.
Snopes could not determine whether the image in question was authentic, meaning not created or edited using artificial intelligence. Google's Gemini AI language model said it did not detect SynthID — an invisible watermark that Google embeds in content created by its generative AI consumer products — in the image. Online AI detectors Sightengine and Hive Moderation both found the image unlikely to have been AI generated. Such detectors are not always completely reliable.
The image did appear to show the woman wearing two different earrings — a hoop in her right ear and a small golden pendant dangling from her left. Such inconsistencies can point to the use of AI.
Some versions of the image carried a watermark identical (archived) to that used by Samira Shuja, an Afghan journalist in the U.K. Snopes could not find the image on Shuja's various social media feeds. We reached out to Shuja to ask about the image and await a reply. We also reached out to an X user who shared an early instance of the image and will update this story if we hear back.
Maduro and Flores face federal drug trafficking charges in the U.S. According to a 25-page indictment, the pair are accused of ordering kidnappings, beatings and murders of people who owed them drug money.