Claim:
Snopes verified a photo of former U.S. President Barack Obama was taken at the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.
Rating:
A rumor that Snopes had verified a photograph depicting a shirtless former U.S. President Barack Obama as being taken at late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private island circulated online in December 2025.
Social media users, particularly on Facebook (archived, archived, archived), shared the purported photograph, with some writing that claims “liberal fact-checker Snopes has determined that the latest Epstein release photo of Barack Obama was ‘completely unaltered.’ In other words, not fake.”
(America Loves Liberty Facebook page)
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor about the photo as fact, but Snopes can confirm we never reported on the alleged photo and the claim in question was clearly labeled as satire.
The post’s misnames the island in question, possibly confusing some readers. In reality, the smaller of Epstein’s islands was called Little St. James, not “Little St. John.”
The photograph itself, if not its alleged location, appeared to be authentic, however. A reverse-image search on Google showed it appearing in stories as far back as 2008 during Obama’s first campaign for president.
An August 2008 article by Hawaii Magazine titled “Beaches! Bodysurfing! Barack Obama begins his Hawaii vacation,” showcased the photo in question. A December 2008 article by The Telegraph featured the same photo with the headline “Barack Obama shirtless: Best of the world leaders?” The photo appeared again in a January 2009 piece, also published by The Telegraph, titled “Barack Obama: redefining the male physique.”
The media continued to be use the photo over the years, including NBC News in a 2012 story about Obama’s love of surfing and Vogue in a 2015 feature titled “How to Dress Your Favorite Dadbod.”
Reputable image repository Getty Images had photos of Obama shirtless and in a similar black bathing suit, vacationing in Hawaii from December 2008.
While the photo appeared to be authentic, the rumor about its connection to Epstein’s island were entirely fabricated.
The rumor originated with a Facebook post by an account called America Loves Liberty, part of a network of websites and social media pages called America’s Last Line of Defense that describes its output as being humorous and satirical in nature. ALLOD describes itself as a “network of trollery” and is linked to websites and social media pages that all identify themselves as satire.
The image in the America Loves Liberty Facebook post included a “satire” label in the bottom right corner. The Facebook page’s Intro section also reads: “Nothing on this page is real.”
Further, ALLOD’s website, the Dunning-Kruger Times, posted a longer version of the satirical Obama post. The “About Us” page of the website reads, “Dunning-Kruger-Times.com is a subsidiary of the ‘America’s Last Line of Defense’ network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery, or as Snopes called it before they lost their war on satire: Junk News.”
The fictional story spread as thousands of documents related to the case against Epstein were released to the public by the Department of Justice.
Snopes has addressed similar satirical claims about alleged connections between Obama and Epstein in the past, including the assertion that Obama was a participant in a ” ritualistic orgy empire” on Epstein’s island and that he awarded Epstein the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.
