There’s an image currently going viral on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that purports to show comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s name in recently released court documents about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the image is completely fake. Kimmel’s name doesn’t show up anywhere in the newly released documents, which are now available online for anyone to see.
“Jimmy Kimmel being mentioned in the Epstein documents,” the viral tweet by an account called aka falsely claimed.
Over 150 names were revealed on Wednesday as part of a court order involving Virginia Giuffre, an alleged victim of Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend. Epstein died by suicide in jail in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges. But, again, Kimmel’s name doesn’t appear in the newly released documents, despite conspiracy theorists insisting it might happen.
The fake tweet racked up over 200,000 views in less than an hour, a signal that it will soon be seen by perhaps millions of people thanks to the X algorithm, which boosts tweets that accumulate views quickly in a kind of snowball effect.
The account that shared the fake tweet, known as @akafacehots has a blue checkmark, a symbol that used to signify a Twitter user had been verified as authentic by the social media company. But after Elon Musk bought the platform in late 2022 he stripped so-called “legacy” checkmarks from longtime users and allowed anyone to buy the “verification” for just $8 per month.
The company no longer verifies the identity of anyone with a checkmark, though users still often associate the mark with information that can trusted. Tweets from users with blue checkmarks also get an artificial boost in X’s algorithm.
X has a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes where people can try to correct bad information from viral tweets. But the fake tweet about Jimmy Kimmel still hasn’t received a Community Note at the time of this writing.
New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made comments on Tuesday on “The Pat McAfee Show” suggesting Kimmel’s name might be mentioned in the documents, a release that became highly anticipated only because it had been publicly ordered by a judge last month. But Kimmel quickly replied on X that he never met Epstein and Rodgers was making his family unsafe by making wild accusations like that.
McAfee apologized on Wednesday but Rodgers has yet to comment on Kimmel’s threat of a possible lawsuit over the comments.
