Is it true that Harris hit a teenager and fled the scene of the accident in 2011?

At the beginning of September 2024, information circulated on the Internet that the US presidential candidate was at fault for an accident in which a 13-year-old girl was seriously injured. We decided to check the veracity of such publications.

It was reported that Kamala Harris, while California Attorney General, hit a pedestrian in San Francisco in 2011 and then drove away from the scene. Media, informational And entertaining portals, as well as many popular Telegram channels: “Putin on Telegram"(178,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Voblya • Kursk" (143,000), "Heavenly"(86,000), "What happened?"(81,000), "Voice of Mordor"(80,000), etc. The news was also discussed by social network users ("VKontakte", X, Facebook). The incident left a black teenage girl seriously injured and "leaving her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life," the report said. The posts are accompanied by a nearly two-minute news story with a KBSF-TV logo in which a girl sitting in a stroller recounts details of how Harris hit her with a car more than a decade ago and then simply drove away from the scene of the accident without attempting to render aid. At the end of the video, X-rays are shown, and a voiceover notes that the victim has undergone 11 operations. Viral publications also indicate that throughout the 13 years that have passed since the accident, the girl remained silent because her mother was threatened by those close to Harris.

At the time of writing this analysis, the website of the KBSF-TV channel is unavailable (however copy its home page is available on the Internet Archive). Apparently, it was on the website kbsf-tv.com that the news about Harris, who allegedly hit a teenager in San Francisco in 2011, appeared for the first time on September 2, 2024. At least “Verified” could not find any earlier mention of this information. 

The website kbsf-tv.com looks suspicious: it does not contain any imprint, editorial contacts, names of employees, links to social networks and other information that is usually present on the pages of the media. Back at the end of August on this site was only one post: “Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing." Domain name kbsf-tv.com was registered as recently as August 20th. However, to September 3 the portal's news feed already had six pages, each of which had up to ten notes, and some of them had July dates under them. That is, it is assumed that the texts were published before the site was created. Although KBSF-TV, as its name suggests, positions itself as a television channel, the vast majority of its publications do not feature videos or reports. The only video that “Verified” was able to find on the site is dedicated specifically to Harris, who allegedly hit a teenager.

As for the content of this publication, it also raises many questions. As the title illustration for the article, the authors used a photo of a car with a broken windshield. Using a reverse Google image search, you can find that this is a photo from a location accidentswhich occurred in 2018 on the island of Guam. In itself, this may not mean anything, since the use of archival thematic photos as illustrations in the absence of real footage from the scene is a common practice in the media. However, the video recording of the allegedly injured girl telling her story does not inspire confidence. So, in the video itself she is presented as Alicia Brown, and in the text of the note - as Alisha Brown. As she completes her story, two x-rays appear in the frame, and a voice-over talks about the girl’s alleged injuries and her treatment. One of these pictures is taken from scientific article, published in 2010 (that is, a year before the alleged accident), the other is from articles 2017. 

Fact checkers of the Lead Stories project checked video sequence and audio track using DeepFake-o-Meter and Resemble AI tools, which help recognize content generated by neural networks. The use of both services showed that the video was highly likely created using artificial intelligence. At the same time, experts respondents fact-checking project PolitiFact cannot confirm such conclusions. Xiwei Liu, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo, notes that there are no artifacts in the video. typical for videos generated by artificial intelligence. “I think it’s probably just a good old fashioned (and not particularly well-made or convincing) cheap fake, just a staged interview,” agrees UC Berkeley professor Hani Farid, who specializes in testing digital disinformation.

Lead Stories and PolitiFact also reached out to San Francisco police, where the accident allegedly occurred, for comment. The department told them that they did not have data on the accident that occurred in 2011 in the specified location. Fact checkers also did not find any notes about the accident described in the video in the Californian press of that time.

Thus, there is no evidence that Harris hit pedestrians in San Francisco in 2011, one of whom was seriously injured and was confined to a wheelchair. The primary source of information is an anonymous website that imitates Californian media and was created just two weeks before the publication of this “sensation.” The video interview with the victim may have been generated by a neural network, and all other illustrations used in the article and video are images that are in the public domain and are definitely not related to the alleged accident.

This is not the first time the scheme for distributing this fake, implemented by its creators, has been used. For example, in early August, pro-Kremlin media told that German Foreign Minister Annalena Bärbock allegedly used escort services during working visits to African countries. The evidence then was a video of the alleged gigolo, posted on the website of a fake German publication. A month earlier the viral became a story about the first lady of Ukraine Elena Zelenskaya, who allegedly bought an expensive car in France. This was reported based on the publication of a French-language website posing as a journalistic investigative project, and a video posted there, which featured a man introduced by a salesman at a car dealership.

Cover photo: X @KamalaHarris

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Lead Stories. Fact Check: Kamala Harris Was NOT In Hit-And-Run Accident In 2011 – 'KBSF' News Station Does NOT Exist, Image Of Crash Is From 2018
2. The Bell. How to distinguish a fake media site from a real one
3. Did Kamala Harris say that with a shrinking population, more children "will be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water"?
4. "The most liberal senator" and "the woman in the blue suit." Analysis of five statements about Kamala Harris
5. Is it true that Kamala Harris’ team used neural networks to create photos and videos of crowds of supporters?