A photo is viral on social media showing Congress leader Sonia Gandhi shaking hands with the late Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier and convicted sex offender.
The photo has gone viral amid hundreds of other high-profile personalities from around the world being implicated in Epstein’s e-mail conversations, or Epstein Files, released by the United States department of justice (DOJ) on January 30.
X user Nation First (@My_Nation_First) posted the viral photo on February 14. (Archive)
देख तेरी राज माता pic.twitter.com/Z18SoS8hEv
— Nation_First (@My_Nation_First) February 14, 2026
A post containing the photo by X user Avinash Mathankar (AvinashMat16) has garnered more than 3 lakh views at the time of this article being written. (Archive)
Several other X users, including @Yeshwant237, @RajTiwa07628531, @mamtan14, @ajaykraina, @Ra_Bies, and others, shared the image with cryptic captions targeting Sonia Gandhi. (Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Screenshots below:
Fact Check
To check whether the concerned photo is authentic, we first ran relevant keyword searches on Google to see if a meeting between Jeffrey Epstein and Sonia Gandhi was reported by any credible news outlet. We could not find any such report.
We noticed that the banner in the background of the photo had garbled text, which was a common characteristic feature of AI generated images.
Thereafter, we ran the photo through Hive’s AI detection tool, which showed a 99.9% possibility of it being artificially generated.
To sum up, the viral photo apparently showing Sonia Gandhi shaking hands with American financer and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is AI-generated.
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