In November 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said a trove of newly released emails from the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein allegedly mentioning U.S. President Donald Trump actually referred to “a different Donald Trump.”
Trump had a well-documented friendship with Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a jail cell in New York City while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Trump has claimed he had a falling out with Epstein in the early 2000s, and it’s unclear what, if anything, the president knew about Epstein’s alleged crimes. U.S. House Democrats released the emails in November 2025, allegedly from Epstein himself, claiming that Trump “knew about the girls” and spent “hours” with a victim at Epstein’s home.
One Facebook user who shared the claim online shared a photo of Leavitt captioned, “‘Jeffrey Epstein was talking about a different Donald Trump’ insists White House.”
(Facebook user Jayne Radcliffe)
Variations of the claim spread on X, Instagram and Threads, as well (archived, archived, archived). Snopes readers searched our site to find out if the claim was true.
Some social media users appeared to recognize that the claim, styled to look like a news report, did not reflect a factual recounting of real-life events, reposting the image of Leavitt with crying laughing emoijs, which can show that something is funny or that someone is in on a joke.
We found no evidence of Leavitt’s reported words in searches on popular search engines (archived, archived, archived) or in her Nov. 12, 2025, news conference where she answered questions about the email release.
Rather, the claim about Leavitt, Trump and the Epstein emails originated (archived) with NewsThump — a website that describes its output as being humorous or satirical in nature. Its Intro page on Facebook states: “NewsThump – Satire (not news, obviously, but we have to put this here because of the idiots).” The Facebook page is also classed as “Satire/Parody.”
Richard Smith, the editor of NewsThump, confirmed the story was satire and wrote:
We always want people laughing because they’re “in on the joke” with us, rather than being deceived into believing the joke is literally true. However, we currently live in a time when the behaviour of certain public figures is at times so entirely ridiculous that exaggerating their behaviour for comedic effect, even to what most would consider ludicrous lengths, can still have an air of plausibility about it. Which says far more about their behaviour than the intent of any comedy writer.
NewsThump has a history of making up satirical stories, sometimes accompanied by photos generated or edited using artificial intelligence. According to Smith, the image used for the story about Leavitt’s alleged quote was “a mixture of AI and Photoshop.”
Leavitt actually said during a Nov. 12, 2025, news conference:
These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong. And what President Trump has always said is that: he was from Palm Beach and so was Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep.
Leavitt called the email release a “distraction campaign” from Republican efforts to reopen the U.S. government following the longest shutdown in history.
Snopes previously debunked claims that Leavitt said Trump could not deal with “co-equal branches of government having the ability to check his power” and investigated a satire claim that Trump ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest fans who booed him at a football game.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.
