Video of Marjorie Taylor Greene posting Epstein sign is altered
- Published on September 16, 2025 at 18:25
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"I don't like her. But even a broken clock is right at least once," says a September 9, 2025 post on Threads.
The video appears to show Greene fixing a large poster to the wall outside her Capitol Hill office.
On the right, the poster includes a print-out of the letter Trump allegedly wrote Epstein -- a sketched outline of a nude woman surrounding a type-written message, and with his signature for pubic hair. The left side shows examples of other Trump signatures from the same time period.
Posts sharing the video circulated across platforms as Trump and his allies denied that he authored the letter and claimed the signature was fake. Trump previously filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting on the existence of the letter, part of a book gifted to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.
The House Oversight Committee published a copy of the book -- turned over by the financier's estate -- on September 8, 2025 (archived here).
Epstein, a wealthy investor with high-level connections around the world, was found dead in his New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for alleged sex trafficking of underage girls. Trump, once a close friend, has been dogged throughout his second presidency by controversy surrounding Epstein -- particularly after his administration deemed the release of additional case files unnecessary.
Greene attended a press conference September 3 with Epstein victims and pledged to "say every damn name that abused these women" on the House floor if given a list.
But the clip circulating online of the congresswoman highlighting the alleged Trump-Epstein correspondence is fake.
"The video is altered," Greene spokesman Alec Ernst told AFP in a September 10 email. "The sign she is displaying in the video is not real."
Reverse image searches revealed that Greene posted the original footage to her official X account on February 24, 2021 (archived here). The video shows, and Ernst confirmed to AFP, that the sign read, "There are TWO genders: MALE and FEMALE. 'Trust the Science.'"
Greene was responding to a since-deleted post from former Democratic Congresswoman Marie Newman, who had displayed a transgender flag outside her office across the hall from Greene's. Newman's daughter is transgender.
The altered version of Greene's video was created by a graphic artist who goes by "Tom Adelsbach" on Facebook and Instagram and has operated several X accounts with handles that sound like the word "politics."
Adelsbach's original posts carry a disclaimer describing the video as "digitally altered" and "satire" (archived here, here and here).
"That was me, and on my IG account and FB account and X, I put a disclaimer on it saying it's digitally manipulated content," Adelsbach told AFP in a September 11 direct message.
AFP has previously debunked other misinformation stemming from Adelsbach's work here.
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