When then-President Bill Clinton and real estate mogul Donald Trump crossed paths at the 2000 U.S. Open in New York, White House photographer William Vasta snapped a picture as the men smiled widely side-by-side in a half embrace.
He caught them in mid-motion, with Trump’s right arm extended toward Clinton, as if he were coming in for a full hug or finishing a handshake. In the frame, Trump’s right hand hangs near Clinton’s crotch.
Fast-forward 25 years. Trump is now president and artificial intelligence is muddying reality. A video using the image shows Trump repeatedly patting Clinton’s crotch and stomach as both men laugh. But Vasta told PolitiFact the video isn’t authentic.
“It’s totally fake,” he said. “From what I remember, no one touched anything.”
Vasta said the Sept. 9, 2000, still image showed the two men posing for pictures in a private suite at the tennis tournament. They might just have shaken hands or they might have been arranging themselves for a group photo.
But the scene in this video is fabricated.
“It’s easy to misinterpret what is happening in a still image,” Vasta said.
(Screenshot/TikTok)
The video made rounds after newly released documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein included an email exchange in which Epstein’s brother mentioned someone called “Bubba.” Some speculated it was a reference to Clinton, whose nickname is Bubba, but Epstein’s brother told The Advocate that’s wrong.
Vasta said the video “clearly is a derivative” of his still images. The video’s lighting matches Vasta’s personal lighting style for still photography, he said. Both the photo and the video show the same shadow Trump’s hat casts on his face, for example.
But in 2000, it was common for indoor videographers to use direct lighting, Vasta said, which means the lighting then captured on video wouldn’t show the same lighting as his photographs from that day.
At the time, video was still a nascent medium and even the White House videography team had limited access, Vasta said. He said he doesn’t remember any videographers in the suite and noted that still photography cameras didn’t have video functionality back then.
Manjeet Rege, director of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, analyzed the video and concluded it was AI-generated based on the real photograph of Trump and Clinton.
“The most prominent sign is the static start artifact where the video begins with a perfectly realistic high-quality frame that suddenly animates with unnatural motion, which is a hallmark of image-to-video AI tools,” Rege said.
During the short clip, the woman standing behind Trump disappears or fades into the scenery, he said. Inconsistent background images strongly signal AI use.
Rege also ran the video through Attestiv, a forensic analysis tool designed to detect media manipulation. For that clip, the tool reported an AI suspicion rating of nearly 100%, he said.
The Clinton Presidential Library released the U.S. Open photos in 2016 in response to a Politico Freedom of Information Act request as Trump sought the presidency against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Politico reported that the photos underscored “just how chummy Trump once was with the president and his wife Hillary.”
The publication didn’t report that the photos showed Trump groping the commander-in-chief. Videos that show Trump touching Clinton’s crotch are AI-generated. Claims that they’re authentic videos are False.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
