After a judge in New York began revealing names linked to the case of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in prison in 2019 before his trial for sexual crimes, a photo of former U.S. President Barack Obama embracing a child surfaced on social media. Publishers claimed that the child had been raped. The post included two images: the first showed Obama with a child, while the second depicted a child bound and placed in a box. The accompanying caption stated, "Leaked photo of Obama raping a young girl along with a picture of the same child being removed from a large cardboard box after being kidnapped and sold for sexual purposes."
While the post garnered millions of views on various social media platforms, particularly on X, it was found to be completely false. The photo actually shows Obama with his niece, while the second image features another child who was murdered in Indonesia. All claims made in the message regarding the former president are incorrect.
A search for the first photo led to its publication on a White House-related account on Flickr, according to AFP, dated January 8, 2024. The accompanying caption indicated that it shows Obama with his niece Savita, taken in the Oval Office in 2015. The second image was similarly found to be used misleadingly in a different context years prior; it shows a child named Putri who was sexually abused and killed, then discarded among waste in Jakarta in 2015, according to a Thai website.
