"Who's Your Daddy?": How AI-Generated Slander is Haunting New York's New Mayor

As New York’s new Mayor Zohran Mamdani enters his second month in City Hall, a viral deepfake — born from satire and fueled by name confusion — reveals just how easily the digital record can be rewritten.

Since early February 2026, a series of manipulated images and spurious claims have circulated on social media, attempting to link the Mayor to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted sex offender. While the claims are demonstrably false-rooted in a combination of AI-generated imagery and deliberate genealogical conflation — their ascent into political discourse highlights the increasing difficulty of maintaining a shared reality in the mid-2020s.

The Anatomy of an Algorithmic Hallucination 

The controversy centers on a photograph purporting to show a “power gathering” on a city street at night. The image depicts a young Zohran Mamdani alongside a surreal assembly of global figures, including Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, and the Mayor’s mother, filmmaker Mira Nair. To a casual observer, the image possesses the grainy, candid quality of a paparazzi snapshot. 

However, a forensic examination reveals the tell-tale artifacts that sometimes continue to plague generative artificial intelligence. 

While modern models have become adept at rendering human likenesses, they occasionally struggle with spatial logic and complex anatomy. In the primary image, Epstein is standing close to Maxwell, seemingly placing a hand on her waist. However, the positioning of his hand appears anatomically questionable; although he is standing at a distance that suggests a normal reach, only the tips of three fingers appear on her far waist, as if her back were of an improbable width.

Furthermore, the entourage in the background exhibits the “warping” effect common in synthetic rendering: one figure appears with pupilless, distorted eyes, while another features a white shirt collar that inexplicably rises to his ear on one side.

Standard deepfake detection tools corroborated these visual inconsistencies, returning a 94% probability that the media was synthetically generated.

The Persistence of the Watermark 

The trajectory of the image is as revealing as its content. It did not originate from a whistleblower or a leaked archive, but from a known satire account on X, “DFF” (DumbFckFinder). Notably, the image was not “scrubbed” of its origin; it bore the  DFF watermark, and the account’s public profile explicitly states that it produces “high quality AI videos and memes” for the purpose of parody.

The transition of the image from a satirical post to a political “bombshell” represents a significant failure in digital literacy. Despite the presence of the watermark, the image was reframed as a factual “leak” from the Epstein files. In an ecosystem where speed often takes precedence over verification, the presence of a satirical label did little to slow the spread of the misinformation once it was decoupled from its original intent.

The Chronological Impossible

Beyond the visual fabrications, the narrative relies on a misunderstanding of the Mayor’s family history. The theory gained traction by exploiting a coincidental surname: Mayor Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, was previously married to Mitch Epstein, a renowned fine-art photographer. There is no familial or professional link between Mitch Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein, yet the shared name provided the necessary “hook” for confirmation bias. 

The conspiracy also cites a 2009 letter from publicist Peggy Siegal — referenced in a Daily Mail report — which mentions Nair attending a post-screening gathering at Maxwell’s home. Even if the social encounter occurred, the chronological math of the “secret son” theory fails. By 2009, Zohran Mamdani was already 18 years old. His father is the academic Mahmood Mamdani, whom Nair married in 1991. The suggestion that a social encounter in 2009 could retroactively account for a birth nearly two decades earlier is a logical void that the viral narrative simply ignored.

A New Standard of Proof

As generative tools become more sophisticated, the barrier to creating a political crisis continues to drop. For the electorate, the incident serves as a reminder that the most “incriminating” evidence now demands the highest level of skepticism. The burden of proof has shifted; it is no longer enough to see a photograph to believe it. In 2026, the first step of political literacy is no longer reading the headline, but checking the fingers, the math, and the source.