Posts spread baseless claim about Karine Jean-Pierre

CLAIM: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was recently in a car accident while driving drunk and the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. responded to the scene.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. MPD has no record of such an incident or arrest, according to a department spokesperson. A spokesperson for the White House further confirmed that the claims are baseless. The claim first emerged from an anonymous Twitter account which provided no evidence and shared photos of old and unrelated incidents.

THE FACTS: Baseless claims that Jean-Pierre was involved in a recent car accident have circulated widely across social media platforms like TikTok and Facebook in recent days, starting from a tweet in late March and then spreading to other platforms and blogs.

The claim first appeared in a series of tweets dated March 26 from an account that regularly promotes unverified claims. The first tweet alleges she was involved in a “REAR-ENDER” the night before, citing only unnamed “sources.” Another tweet in the thread claims that Jean-Pierre was “slurring her words and had difficulty standing straight” and that D.C. police are “refusing” to release body camera footage of the incident. Various images, including photos of Jean-Pierre and different photos taken at night of a police vehicle and the back of a police officer in uniform, were also featured in the thread.

The unverified claims quickly spread online. One Twitter user, pointing to the original tweet as evidence, wrote, “She was allegedly slurring her words, unable to stand, and they are refusing to release the body cam footage.” Similar text circulated widely on TikTok. Several blogs also promoted the claims in posts on Monday.

But there is no evidence for these claims.

“It’s fabricated,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

The Metropolitan Police Department also has no record of such an arrest or incident, Alaina Gertz, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email to the AP.

“I do not have anything in our system for an arrest of this individual,” Gertz wrote. She added that she could not locate a report to “corroborate those claims.”

Additionally, reverse image searches show that the photos featured in the various posts depict old incidents.

For instance, the image of a police vehicle is featured in a news report about a September 2022 incident involving police locking a handcuffed woman in a parked patrol vehicle that was hit by a freight train. An image of the back of a uniformed police officer appears in a January 2023 news report about the fatal arrest of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. And a different photo of a police vehicle can be found in a February 2023 news report about a shooting in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Twitter user that originally made the claim also falsely suggested in a March 27 tweet that a May 2022 AP photo of Jean-Pierre was taken after the alleged “fender bender.”

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.