About this rating
In October 2026, social media users spread an image that claimed to show a woman being punched in the face at one of U.S. President Donald Trump's rallies.
The person in the picture was wearing a shirt that said "RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES." (The Justice Department hasreleased millions of filesrelated to its investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, butcritics allegethe agency made redactions to obscure information.)
The image circulated on platformssuch as XandFacebook. Many users sharing the image appeared to believe it was authentic.
"If there's one photo to sum up the Trump era, this is it," oneX postaid.
While a protester wearing a similar shirtwas, in fact, attackedat an Oct. 12 Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, the image above was created using generative artificial intelligence, according to OpenAI's detection software. As such, we have rated this image as fake.
OpenAI's verification tooldetected an invisible watermark on the image called SynthID, which the company's AI tools, like ChatGPT, embed in generated images. (As such, the service can only detect images generated with OpenAI's software and does not detect AI generation via other large-language models, such as Google's Gemini.)
(OpenAI)
SynthID detectors are largely accurate but can still be fallible. However, a review of crediblefootagetaken from the Trump rally indicated that the actual protester was wearing slightly different clothing, including an open flannel layered on top of the T-shirt. The T-shirt the real person wore also had variations in the lettering style and coloring, unlike the more uniform version in the AI-generated image.
A reverse-image search could not determine the original creator behind the AI-generated picture.
Numerous reputable news organizations, includingNBC Newsand an ABCaffiliate, have published legitimate footage of the event.
NBC News'videoshows rally attendees chanting, "USA, USA, USA" as a man in a gray shirt and a baseball cap appears to push down the protester. Another man in a dark blue or black shirt appears to tackle the protester, hit her and putherin a headlock. Security officials then escort the protester away.
Another clip posted by WKBN, a Youngstown television news station, shows that the same man pulled on the protester's hair:
