Image of woman protesting outside Trump-Starmer meeting is fake
- Published on August 1, 2025 at 18:58
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Best Monday in Scotland evah. This lady is wicked awesome," says a July 28, 2025 post on Threads.
The clip appears to be a Fox News broadcast showing Trump, with Starmer beside him, speaking about his Truth Social platform from inside his Turnberry resort on Scotland's southwestern coast as a woman stands outside the window carrying a sign that reads: "Trump is a cunt."
Similar posts shared the video or still images from it across Threads and other platforms such as Instagram and X, with some users branding the woman a hero and others wondering how she managed to evade the US Secret Service.
Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski, whose YouTube channel "Secular Talk" has 1.9 million subscribers, was among those who amplified the clip on X.
Trump's press conference with Starmer came toward the end of a five-day tour of Scotland spent playing golf, opening a new course and signing a major trade deal with the European Union.
The president's visit drew some protests, with several hundred people demonstrating outside the US consulate in the capital Edinburgh and further north in the city of Aberdeen, near where he inaugurated his new golf course in Balmedie.
But the video spreading online is altered.
The original footage of the sit-down, as carried live by Fox News, shows no such protester outside as Trump mentions Truth Social -- or at any other point during the press conference.
Photos distributed by AFP from the event further confirm the woman depicted in the online posts was not truly there.
The protester edited into the background of the altered video is the late Scottish comedian Janey Godley, who famously stood outside Trump's Turnberry course with the anti-Trump sign in June 2016. Godley, who died in 2024 (archived here), had posted the original picture of her stunt to social media, a blog on Medium and her personal website (archived here, here and here).
She also shared other photos, a clip showcasing the poster and a YouTube video recapping the incident (archived here, here and here).
She went on to protest other Trump visits in similar fashion. During his 2025 trip, a protester in Edinburgh held a sign saying, "Janey Godley was right."
AFP previously debunked other misinformation about Trump's time in Scotland here.
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