A sustained run of fabricated quotes, doctored videos, forged statements and fake photographs has been circulated about New York mayor Zohran Mamdani since his 2025 campaign, including a false claim that he intends to impose Sharia law
By The Conspiratory EditorsAugust 4, 2026
Where the evidence lands: ContradictedThat the quotes, photographs, videos and statements circulating about Zohran Mamdani are authentic: that a former mayor gave an interview denouncing him, that the Islamic State group issued a statement about him, that he was photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, that he demanded white New Yorkers pay cash reparations, that he refused to applaud at a soldier's funeral, and that he intends to bring Sharia law to New York City.
Contradicted. This file rates the authenticity of a run of specific artifacts circulated about New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani since late 2025, and the answer on the ones that have been checked is consistent: they are fabricated. A British newspaper published an interview with former mayor Bill de Blasio criticising Mamdani that turned out to have been given by an impostor, and retracted and apologised for it. A statement attributed to the Islamic State group linking Mamdani to the organisation was fabricated and amplified by influencers, as AFP reported. A photograph purporting to show a young Mamdani alongside Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is fake. A quote about white New Yorkers paying cash reparations is false. A video appearing to show him not applauding at a soldier's funeral is AI-generated and had carried an AI disclaimer before being reposted without one. The recurring claim that he intends to bring Sharia law to New York is baseless: PolitiFact found no evidence for it, and it is an anti-Muslim smear aimed at the city's first Muslim mayor, which is what this file calls it. Not everything attached to him is fake, and this file says so where that is the case: a petition by relatives of 9/11 victims was real. What is rated here is the authenticity of the fabricated items, and on that the verdict is debunked. Nothing here is a judgement on Mamdani's politics or his record, which are legitimate subjects of argument and are not what these artifacts are.
Believed by: Largely a right-leaning online audience in the United States, with individual items amplified by influencers, partisan outlets, and in one instance a member of Congress; many of the artifacts also reached ordinary users who encountered them as ordinary political news
Opening entry. The most recent item in the sequence is the funeral video, which Lead Stories checked on 3 August and found to be AI-generated, with an earlier version carrying an AI disclaimer that was missing when the clip was reposted on 1 August. That stripped label is the detail worth tracking: the EU's AI Act transparency obligations for deepfake disclosure took effect on 2 August 2026, one day after this repost, and this case is a clean illustration of the gap such rules have to close. This file will be updated as further items are checked. source →
The full story
An impostor, and a newspaper that fell for him
The best place to start is not with a social-media fake but with a national newspaper, because it establishes how good this material has become.
In late October 2025, during the New York mayoral campaign, The Times of London published an interview in which former mayor Bill de Blasio, a public supporter of Zohran Mamdani, appeared to have turned against him. One quote had him saying the math did not hold up under scrutiny. A rival campaign immediately amplified it.
De Blasio had never spoken to the reporter. He wrote publicly that the story was entirely false and fabricated. The paper took the article down about ninety minutes after publication and apologised, explaining that its reporter had been misled by someone falsely claiming to be the former mayor.
That is the ground floor for everything that follows. The failure was not an algorithm or an anonymous account. It was an editorial process at a major title, defeated by a person who claimed to be someone else over a channel the reporter accepted. If that is achievable against a newspaper, the difficulty of achieving it against a scrolling audience is not worth discussing.
Six fakes, six different methods
What makes this run unusual is not its volume but its technical range. These are not variations on one trick. Each item was made a different way, which is part of why no single debunking generalises to the next.
Impersonation. The de Blasio interview, above: a human being deceiving a journalist.
Forgery of a third party. In November 2025, AFP reported that influencers had amplified a fabricated Islamic State statementcirculated to link the mayor-elect to the group. Independent experts and terrorism analysts identified it as fake. This is a distinct and nastier technique: rather than putting words in the subject's mouth, it manufactures an endorsement from the most damaging possible source.
Image manipulation. A photograph placing a young Mamdani beside Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Clinton, Gates and Bezos. Snopes rated it fake. It makes no argument at all; it asserts a proximity and lets the viewer supply the conclusion.
Fabricated quotation. A claim that he said white New Yorkers must pay cash reparations for slavery, rated false by Snopes.
Satire laundering. A grocery-store meme built on an unrelated photograph and a false claim about his family, which began life as labelled satire and was recirculated as news.
Synthetic video. The clip appearing to show him declining to applaud at the funeral of Staff Sergeant Angel Rampersad, found by Lead Stories to be AI-generated. In the real footage he was applauding.
A human impostor, a forged communique, a doctored photo, an invented quote, laundered satire, and an AI video. Six items, six different production methods, one subject.
The claim that never needed evidence
Running under the individual artifacts is an older and more durable claim: that Mamdani intends to bring Sharia law to New York.
PolitiFact examined this in November 2025, as advanced by a member of Congress, and rated it false. It found no evidence in his record that he seeks to implement religious law. It noted that US constitutional law forbids any religious code from displacing civil law, so no mayor could do this whatever they wanted. And it noted that his stated positions run contrary to the project attributed to him.
We are naming this for what it is rather than filing it as a contested policy dispute, because it is not one. It takes a politician's religion and converts it, with no evidence at any point, into a concealed legal agenda. That is an anti-Muslim smear, and it is aimed at the first Muslim to hold the office. The forged Islamic State statement is the same move with a prop attached.
The structural giveaway is that the claim never required an artifact in the first place. The photograph had to be made, the video had to be generated, the quote had to be written. The Sharia claim needed only to be said, because the frame it plugs into was built long before this mayor existed. That is what makes it the most durable item here and the hardest to answer: there is no forgery to expose, only an absence to point at.
The label that fell off
One detail in the funeral video deserves separating out, because it is the most consequential thing in this file and has nothing to do with New York politics.
Lead Stories found that an earlier version of the clip carried an AI disclaimer. The version reposted on 1 August 2026 did not. Somewhere between those two posts, a correctly labelled piece of synthetic media became an unlabelled one, and travelled.
This is the failure mode that every disclosure regime has to solve and none has yet. The EU AI Act's transparency obligations, which require deployers of systems generating deepfake image, audio or video to disclose that the content is artificial, took effect on 2 August 2026, the day after this repost. Rules of that kind attach a label at the point of generation or upload. Nothing yet makes the label survive a download, a re-encode, and an upload somewhere else by someone with no interest in keeping it.
The disclaimer was there. Somebody removed it, and the video kept travelling. That is the whole problem with labelling, in one artifact.
So this case is a useful test object. The creator did the right thing. The system still failed, because the correct behaviour of the first person in the chain confers no protection against the second. Any honest assessment of what disclosure rules can achieve has to start there.
Why the volume does the work
No individual item in this file needed to persuade anybody for very long. That is not how the mechanism works.
The operative product is accumulation. A person who encounters six separate stories about one politician over ten months, and never encounters any of the six corrections, does not end up believing any specific claim. They end up with a general impression that there is always something with this man. That impression survives the debunking of every component, because it was never resting on any of them.
The fakes are also parasitic on a real disagreement. Mamdani's programme is genuinely contested and reasonable people oppose it. That gives a fabricated quote somewhere to land: it does not arrive as an outlandish assertion, it arrives as one more instance of what the audience already believes about him. Fabrications attached to figures nobody has strong feelings about tend not to travel at all.
And the correction arithmetic is simply unfavourable. The Times took its article down in ninety minutes and apologised, which is close to best-case institutional behaviour, and the quotes still outran the retraction. A fact-check published three days after a clip has been reposted without its AI label is not competing on equal terms. None of this is a failure of the fact-checkers. It is arithmetic, and it will not improve on its own.
What this file is not saying
A file like this carries an obvious risk of being read as a defence of its subject's politics, so it is worth being explicit about the boundary.
Nothing here is a judgement on Mamdani's record, his programme, or whether he is a good mayor. Those are legitimate subjects of argument, and people who dislike everything he stands for can agree with every finding on this page. The question rated here is narrow and factual: are these particular artifacts genuine? On the ones that have been checked, they are not.
The same discipline requires recording the counter-example. In August 2026 Snopes examined reporting that relatives of 9/11 victims had petitioned to exclude the mayor from a 25th anniversary commemoration, and rated it true. The petition was real and was organised by a man whose wife died in the attacks. A file that collected only the fakes would be doing a version of the same thing it is criticising.
That distinction is the actual work. “A lot of things are said about this man” is not a method for sorting them, in either direction. Six of these items were fabricated, by six different methods, and one story people assumed was invented turned out to be accurate. The only way to know which is which is the slow one, and the slow one is always going to lose the first three days.
What's still unexplained
- Whether any of this is coordinated is unestablished. The items span impersonation, forgery, image manipulation and AI video, which is a wide technical range, but no published network analysis attributes them to a common source, and a polarised information environment can produce this pattern without anyone organising it.
- The de Blasio impersonation is the one case with a potential identifiable actor, since a person actively deceived a reporter. Who that was has not been publicly established, and The Times has not said more than that its reporter was misled.
- The stripped AI disclaimer on the funeral video raises a question the current disclosure rules do not answer: labels attach to files at the point of generation or upload, and nothing carries them across a repost on a different platform. Whether any labelling regime can survive that is a live technical and regulatory question.
- The real-world effects are not well measured. Fact-checkers document individual artifacts, but there is no rigorous public accounting of what a sustained fabrication campaign does to a subject's ability to govern, or to the safety of the community a smear invokes.
Point by point
The claim: A British national newspaper published Bill de Blasio criticising Mamdani, so at minimum that one is real.
What the record shows: That one is the clearest fabrication of the set, because the publisher established it themselves. The Times of London removed the article about ninety minutes after publishing it and apologised, saying its reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former mayor. De Blasio wrote publicly that the story was entirely false and fabricated and that he had never communicated with the author. This is worth dwelling on: the failure was not a social-media account but an editorial process at a major newspaper, defeated by a person claiming over a channel the reporter accepted to be someone he was not. If that can happen to a national title with a subeditor and a legal read, the bar for a screenshot on X is nowhere.
The claim: The Islamic State group issued a statement about Mamdani, which speaks for itself.
What the record shows: The statement was forged. AFP reported in November 2025 that right-wing influencers had amplified a fabricated communique attributed to the group in an effort to associate the mayor-elect with it, and that independent experts and terrorism analysts identified it as fake. Fabricating a jihadist communique to attach to a Muslim politician is not an ordinary political falsehood; it is an attempt to code an elected official as a terrorist sympathiser by manufacturing the terrorists' own endorsement. That the artifact is fake is established. What it was for is visible on its face.
The claim: He is going to bring Sharia law to New York, which is why his religion is a legitimate campaign issue.
What the record shows: PolitiFact examined this claim in November 2025, as made by a member of Congress, and rated it false. It reported finding no evidence in his record that he seeks to implement religious law, noted that US constitutional law bars any religious code from displacing civil law so that no mayor could do this regardless of intent, and observed that his stated positions are inconsistent with such a programme. This is the oldest and most persistent item in the set, and it is an anti-Muslim smear: it takes a politician's faith and converts it, without evidence, into a covert legal agenda. We name it as that rather than treating it as a contested policy question, because it is not a policy question and never was.
The claim: There is a photograph of him with Epstein and Maxwell, and a photograph is a photograph.
What the record shows: Snopes rated the image fake. The composition is doing something specific worth noticing: it places a young Mamdani in a group with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, which is less an accusation than an association bundle, borrowing the accumulated suspicion around a genuinely notorious network and attaching a face to it. Photographs are the most trusted and now among the least reliable artifacts in circulation, and a fabricated group photo requires no claim to be argued at all. It simply asserts a proximity and lets the viewer finish the sentence.
The claim: The funeral video is just footage. Nobody edited what he did with his hands.
What the record shows: Lead Stories found the video AI-generated, and in the authentic footage Mamdani and others were applauding. One detail is worth extracting: an earlier version of the clip had carried an AI disclaimer, and the version reposted on 1 August did not. That is a labelled synthetic artifact being stripped of its label in transit. It matters beyond this case, because it is the exact failure mode that disclosure rules are designed to prevent and the exact thing they cannot enforce once a file leaves the platform that labelled it. The label travelled less well than the video.
The claim: So much material about one man cannot all be fake. Some of it must be landing on something real.
What the record shows: Volume is the mechanism here, not evidence of an underlying truth. Each item was fabricated separately, by different means, and each has been checked individually: an impersonation, a forged communique, a doctored photograph, a false quote, a satire item recirculated as news, an AI video. Nothing about the quantity makes any individual artifact more likely to be genuine, though it reliably makes the subject seem more suspicious, which is the effect the quantity is producing. This file also records the counter-example rather than hiding it: the 9/11 families' petition was real, and Snopes rated it true. Distinguishing the two is the whole job, and 'there is a lot of it' is not a method for doing so.
Timeline
- 2025-10-28 to 2025-10-29During the mayoral campaign, The Times of London publishes an interview in which Bill de Blasio, a Mamdani supporter, appears to turn on the candidate, with quotes including that 'the math doesn't hold up under scrutiny'. Rival campaign aides seize on it. De Blasio states publicly that the story is entirely false and fabricated and that he never spoke to the reporter. The paper removes the article roughly an hour and a half after publication and apologises, saying its reporter had been misled by someone falsely claiming to be the former mayor.
- 2025-11-04Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election, becoming the city's first Muslim and first South Asian mayor.
- 2025-11-07PolitiFact examines the claim, made by Representative Nancy Mace, that Mamdani is bringing Sharia law to America, and rates it false. It reports finding no evidence that he seeks to implement religious law, and notes both that US constitutional law forbids any religious code from supplanting civil law and that his stated positions run contrary to such a project.
- 2025-11-12AFP reports that right-wing influencers have amplified a fabricated statement attributed to the Islamic State group, circulated to link the new mayor-elect to the organisation. Independent experts and terrorism analysts identify it as a forgery. The report is republished by CEDMO, a European Digital Media Observatory hub.
- 2026-07An image circulates purporting to show a young Mamdani standing with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Snopes rates it fake.
- 2026-07-31Snopes rates false a claim that Mamdani said white New Yorkers must pay cash reparations for slavery, finding that he did not specify views of the kind attributed to him. The same day it examines a viral grocery-store meme built on an unrelated photograph and a fabricated rumour about his family, which originated as labelled satire.
- 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-03A video circulates appearing to show Mamdani conspicuously not applauding at the funeral of Staff Sergeant Angel Rampersad. Lead Stories finds it AI-generated and, notably, that an earlier version had carried an AI disclaimer which was absent when the clip was reposted on 1 August. In the authentic footage he and others are applauding.
- 2026-08-02Snopes examines reporting about a petition by relatives of 9/11 victims seeking to exclude Mamdani from a 25th anniversary commemoration, and rates the account true: the petition is real and was organised by a man whose wife died in the attacks. Not every story attached to him in this period is fabricated, and this file records that.
Contradicted. This file rates the authenticity of a run of specific artifacts circulated about New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani since late 2025, and the answer on the ones that have been checked is consistent: they are fabricated. A British newspaper published an interview with former mayor Bill de Blasio criticising Mamdani that turned out to have been given by an impostor, and retracted and apologised for it. A statement attributed to the Islamic State group linking Mamdani to the organisation was fabricated and amplified by influencers, as AFP reported. A photograph purporting to show a young Mamdani alongside Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is fake. A quote about white New Yorkers paying cash reparations is false. A video appearing to show him not applauding at a soldier's funeral is AI-generated and had carried an AI disclaimer before being reposted without one. The recurring claim that he intends to bring Sharia law to New York is baseless: PolitiFact found no evidence for it, and it is an anti-Muslim smear aimed at the city's first Muslim mayor, which is what this file calls it. Not everything attached to him is fake, and this file says so where that is the case: a petition by relatives of 9/11 victims was real. What is rated here is the authenticity of the fabricated items, and on that the verdict is debunked. Nothing here is a judgement on Mamdani's politics or his record, which are legitimate subjects of argument and are not what these artifacts are.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed August 4, 2026 · How we rate
Common questions
Is The Mamdani fabrications true?
Contradicted. This file rates the authenticity of a run of specific artifacts circulated about New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani since late 2025, and the answer on the ones that have been checked is consistent: they are fabricated. A British newspaper published an interview with former mayor Bill de Blasio criticising Mamdani that turned out to have been given by an impostor, and retracted and apologised for it. A statement attributed to the Islamic State group linking Mamdani to the organisation was fabricated and amplified by influencers, as AFP reported. A photograph purporting to show a young Mamdani alongside Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is fake. A quote about white New Yorkers paying cash reparations is false. A video appearing to show him not applauding at a soldier's funeral is AI-generated and had carried an AI disclaimer before being reposted without one. The recurring claim that he intends to bring Sharia law to New York is baseless: PolitiFact found no evidence for it, and it is an anti-Muslim smear aimed at the city's first Muslim mayor, which is what this file calls it. Not everything attached to him is fake, and this file says so where that is the case: a petition by relatives of 9/11 victims was real. What is rated here is the authenticity of the fabricated items, and on that the verdict is debunked. Nothing here is a judgement on Mamdani's politics or his record, which are legitimate subjects of argument and are not what these artifacts are.
What is The Mamdani fabrications?
Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on 4 November 2025, the first Muslim and first South Asian to hold the office. Around that campaign and the months since, an unusually sustained run of fabricated material has circulated about him, and the notable thing is how varied the techniques are. One was a straightforward impersona…
What does the evidence show?
That one is the clearest fabrication of the set, because the publisher established it themselves. The Times of London removed the article about ninety minutes after publishing it and apologised, saying its reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former mayor. De Blasio wrote publicly that the story was entire…
Why do people believe it?
The fabrications are unusually well made, and several arrived through channels people are right to trust. A national newspaper is not a Facebook screenshot. When The Times published the de Blasio interview, believing it was the correct response to the available evidence, and the paper itself had to be the one to discover otherwise.
What is still unresolved?
Whether any of this is coordinated is unestablished. The items span impersonation, forgery, image manipulation and AI video, which is a wide technical range, but no published network analysis attributes them to a common source, and a polarised information environment can produce this pattern without anyone organising it.
Sources
- 1.Newspaper removes interview with Bill de Blasio after former NYC mayor says the quotes were 'fabricated', NBC New York (2025)
- 2.Times of London Apologizes for Fake Bill de Blasio Interview Criticizing Zohran Mamdani, TheWrap (2025)
- 3.No, Zohran Mamdani is not 'bringing Sharia law to America', PolitiFact (2025)
- 4.Fake Islamic State group statement targets Mamdani's NYC mayoral election, AFP, republished by CEDMO (2025)
- 5.Image allegedly shows young Mamdani with Epstein, Maxwell, Clinton, Gates and Bezos. Don't be fooled, Snopes (2026)
- 6.Did Mamdani say white New Yorkers must pay cash reparations for slavery?, Snopes (2026)
- 7.Mamdani discount grocery store meme shows unrelated photo, false claim about family, Snopes (2026)
- 8.Fact Check: FAKE Video Shows Zohran Mamdani Not Applauding At Funeral Of Staff Sgt. Angel Rampersad, Originally Had AI Disclaimer, Lead Stories (2026)
- 9.Why some 9/11 families signed petition to exclude Mamdani from memorial event, Snopes (2026)
Embed this verdict on your site
Paste this snippet to show our sourced verdict as a small card, with a link back to the full case file. Free to use.
<iframe src="https://theconspiratory.com/embed/mamdani-fabrications" title="The Conspiratory verdict" width="520" height="190" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>Help us investigate
This is a living case file. If you spot an error or know evidence we missed, tell us, and weigh in on where you land.
Where do you land?
Cast your read on this one.
Comments
Add your take. Comments are read and approved by a human before they appear, so keep it on topic and civil. Please do not accuse named, living people of crimes.