In July 2025, the US President entered into a public conflict with The Wall Street Journal. The media wrote that at one time the politician sent an obscene letter to a financier who was subsequently detained on charges of sexual exploitation of minors. In posts on this topic, some Telegram channels allegedly included a photograph of this letter. We have verified the authenticity of this image.
On July 19, it became known that US President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal. Two days earlier, the publication reported that in the early 2000s, the future head of state sent financier Jeffrey Epstein an unusual birthday greeting - a letter with a drawing of a naked woman. Telegram channels illustrated news of the lawsuit with an alleged photograph of this letter. This is what the channels didAx Live"(704,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Putin on Telegram"(132,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(113,000), "Bullet" (72,000), "From the scene"(46,000), etc.
Epstein was detained in 2019 accusation in human trafficking for the purpose of their sexualized exploitation. A month after his arrest, he died in his cell - according to official data, the financier committed suicide. In 2024, during his election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised release all documents related to Epstein's case, including the circumstances of his death and his clients. After Trump's inauguration with the same promises performed senior members of his administration. However, in July 2025, the US Department of Justice and the FBI released a joint statement saying they had found no evidence that Epstein's client list existed. Trump himself soon said that conversations about this list were inspired his opponents from the Democratic Party.
July 17, The Wall Street Journal published investigation, according to which in 2003 now convicted Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell gave him an album with indecent congratulations from the financier's friends for his 50th birthday. One of these letters, the publication claims, was written by Trump. Two days before the publication of the material, its authors turned to the US President himself for comment - he denied that he had sent such congratulations to Epstein and threatened The Wall Street Journal with legal action. July 19 Trump reported, that he filed a libel suit against the editors of the newspaper and its owners and requires from them compensation in the amount of at least $20 billion.
It was the news about Trump’s lawsuit that was accompanied in Telegram channels by a photograph of a letter that the politician allegedly sent to Epstein more than 20 years ago. The photo shows an album, on one of the pages of which is a silhouette of a woman with illegible handwritten text in the middle. In the genital area there is a signature - Donald.
However, in The Wall Street Journal's material there is neither this photograph nor other photographs with a drawing of Trump - it provides only a verbal description of him. It is reported that the congratulations that the future president sent to Epstein look like typewritten text over an image of a naked female body, and Trump's signature is in the intimate area of the silhouette. The text of the congratulations is an imaginary dialogue between Trump and Epstein, which ends with the phrase: “Happy birthday - let every day become another beautiful secret.” This description does not match the viral image, where the illegible (and much shorter) text is written rather than typed.
A reverse photo search on Google revealed that for the first time this image published On July 18, the German tabloid Bild wrote about Trump's reaction to the publication of The Wall Street Journal. The photo is accompanied by the caption: “The drawing may look something like this. The Wall Street Journal has not yet published a single photograph of him, but emphasizes that the editors were able to see the album and letter. Photo: Bild infographic created with AI.”
July 20 at 11:14 Moscow time this image published Telegram channel “Bild in Russian”, talking about Trump’s lawsuit. However, unlike the original German-language note on the site, this post does not clarify that the picture was created by the journalists themselves solely for illustrative purposes. After the publication of “Bild in Russian,” the image spread massively across other Telegram channels as a genuine photograph of a drawing from an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
In the English-language segment of social networks (in particular, in X, BlueSky, Instagram And Threads) at least two more similar images went viral. In both pictures, the typewritten text retold in The Wall Street Journal's investigation is clearly visible, and a silhouette of a naked woman is also drawn on top of it. They differ in that the second photo uses the letterhead of The Trump Organization, the holding company of the US President, as the background. Fact checkers from Lead Stories concluded that both of these images are not related to the original letter, and the author of one of the pictures directly called his work an artistic reconstruction.
Thus, the image of the raunchy congratulations that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein more than 20 years ago, which went viral on Telegram channels, was generated by AI based on his text description in an investigation by The Wall Street Journal. At the time of writing this analysis, the American newspaper itself had not published photographs of the letter.
Cover photo: social networks
- The Wall Street Journal. Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump
- Lead Stories. Fact Check: Viral Image Is NOT Trump Drawing For Jeffrey Epstein Described By WSJ – Artist's Recreation
- Did Trump's press secretary really not wear a cross at the briefing where she said the Epstein list didn't exist?
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