The recent unveiling of Jeffrey Epstein’s celebrity connections has led to a string of misleading and false claims regarding public figures the late financier allegedly associated with.
Several names were revealed after documents from a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, an alleged trafficking victim, against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, were unsealed on Wednesday. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted in December 2021 of helping Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls. An individual named in the documents does not mean they have committed wrongdoing, and most had been mentioned previously in legal proceedings or news accounts.
The unsealing has inspired lists of bogus connections that have continued to dupe social media, with a new one of famous faces including The Rock, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus, attracting attention this week.
Beyonce and Dwayne Johnson
Beyonce arrives for the Premiere Of Disney’s “The Lion King” held at Dolby Theatre on July 9, 2019 in Hollywood, California, and Dwayne Johnson attends the “Black Adam” photocall at NH Collection Madrid Eurobuilding hotel on October 19, 2022 in Madrid, Spain.
A post on X, formerly Twitter, by user Qmum/@Nancy023922191, posted on January 7, 2024, viewed more than 1.8 million times, said: “Maxwell was arrested for Supplying Children to Pedophiles
While this post doesn’t specify what connection these people have to Maxwell or Epstein, almost no one in this list had known connections to them.
Bogus Epstein lists have become almost something of a cliche in misinformation circles, drawing on the immense interest surrounding Epstein and the cache of actual celebrity connections Epstein had.
Al Gore, Kamala Harris, Jimmy Kimmel are among just some of public figures who have been falsely linked to Epstein or Maxwell. Newsweek has published a full list of the names mentioned in the documents unsealed in the Virginia Giuffre lawsuit.
This list is completely bogus. None of these names appear in the flight logs published by Gawker in 2015, nor were any of these names mentioned in the unsealed Ghislaine Maxwell lawsuit documents released on Wednesday January 3.
Only one name appeared in Epstein’s “Black Book,” the financier’s phonebook contact list: Alec Baldwin. Baldwin was among 1,510 people in the book published again by Gawker in 2015.
The rest of the names have not appeared anywhere else in any of the court documents or in others released in connection with Maxwell or Epstein.
