On December 12, Democratic representatives released 19 photos from the files of New York financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison. The images show a number of well-known people, including Steve Bannon, Woody Allen and Bill Gates. US President Donald Trump appears in three of the photos. None of the images appear to show these public figures engaging in criminal behaviour.
Still, one of the photos featuring Donald Trump sparked a lot of online discussion. The photo, which was likely taken in the 1990s, shows the future president surrounded by six women wearing Hawaiian leis. Black squares cover the women’s faces in order to protect their identities.
Pro-Trump social media users claim that Democrats blacked out the women’s faces purely to make it impossible to determine their ages, so that viewers would be more likely to interpret the image as further indication that the president may have abused underage girls who were victims of Epstein’s sexual trafficking ring.
On December 14, some of these social media users claimed to reveal an uncensored version of the photo, which would clear up questions about the women’s ages.
The photo at the bottom, said to show the faces of the women hidden in the censored image shared by Democrats, was actually generated by AI. It was posted online on December 14, 2025. © Instagram
One pro-Trump social media user, who shared the photo in a post that garnered more than 4,000 likes on Instagram, said:
“Democrats and their lackeys in the media are circulating a picture of Donald Trump with a bunch of young beautiful women wearing Hawaiian leis with faces blacked out to give the implication that Trump was hanging around with underage women supplied by Epstein.
The truth is that the women in the photo were models representing Hawaiian Tropic, the American suntan lotion brand, at an event at Mar-a-Lago.”
A fake image generated by AI from a real photo
Pro-Trump social media users were right to say that the anonymised photo is not proof that Trump abused underage girls. So far, there has been no evidence for such an accusation.
That said, the photo said to show the faces of the women posing with Donald Trump has been digitally altered. If you run the image through a reverse image search (check out one of our handy guides to find out how), then you can find the original, undoctored image.
There are a few details in the image that are clear indications that it was generated by artificial intelligence (AI). First of all, Donald Trump’s right hand is visibly deformed. This is a clue that artificial intelligence has been used to generate the image, as AI struggles to accurately depict details of human anatomy.
Another clue: the undoctored image has a logo at the bottom right. This diamond-shaped logo represents Google’s AI image generator, Nano Banana, which is integrated in Gemini, the company’s AI chatbot. Google Lens also indicates that the image was “created by Google’s AI”. Images generated by Nano Banana have an invisible watermark, which can be detected by SynthID, a detection tool used by Google Lens.
In this image, you can see Donald Trump’s deformed hand, often a clue that an image was AI-generated, as well as the Google AI watermark. Our team clipped out a section of the image and zoomed in. © Google Lens
Finally, the image is supposed to show a group of six women standing with Trump. However, there are only five in the AI-generated image.
US tabloid the New York Post published a photo on December 12 that they said showed the uncensored original image, showing the faces of the six women.
The photo published in the New York Post reveals the face of the sixth woman, who disappeared in the AI-generated image. The brown haired woman is standing to the left of the president.
In the photo created by AI, the woman was replaced by Trump’s deformed-looking hand. The faces of the women in the photo published by the New York Post are completely different to those that appear in the AI-generated image.
On December 12, the New York Post published what they claimed was an uncensored version of the photo of Donald Trump posing with six women. © New York Post
‘Using AI to improve censored images is dangerous’
So what happened? Well, someone probably asked Google’s AI to uncensor the photo of Donald Trump.
This is a dangerous use of this tool, warns open source analyst Tal Hagin on X:
“This is why using AI to enhance blurred or redacted images is dangerous.
AI does not recover hidden details. It hallucinates them. It fills in gaps based on patterns, not reality. That means it can easily manufacture a completely different person’s face.”
This type of content is even more misleading because it is a fake generated from a real photo connected to an event that really took place.
Just as pro-Trump social media users claimed, the women who appear in the photo were models working for Hawaiian Tropic sun lotion, which was revealed by the British newspaper The Telegraph. The paper interviewed one of the women who appears in the photo. She said that she was 22 when the photo was taken, likely in 1998. She added that Trump behaved like a “gentleman”.
This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.