Social media has been flooded with shocking excerpts from the Epstein files ever since the latest release by the U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 30. But not everything that’s circulating right now about the late sex trafficker is real. And some of the conspiracy theories that have cropped up are highly questionable—an unnecessary distraction from the very real and extremely damning evidence present in the files.
The latest conspiracy theory claims that Jeffrey Epstein is both alive and playing Fortnite in Israel, if you can believe it. So let’s break down the evidence.
An X account called Truthpole posted screenshots on Thursday that claimed to show a Fortnite account called littlestjeff1 that was said to be tied to Jeffrey Epstein and active in Israel. A follow-up tweet with deceptively edited images also claimed to show more evidence for this theory.
The theory hinges on the idea that Fortnite user littlestjeff1 is actually Jeffrey Epstein, a claim for which we have no evidence. Epstein appears to have had a YouTube account with the user name littlestjeff1, but it’s not clear that Epstein ever actually played the game.
Social media users have pointed to an email with the subject line “Alert – the $25.95 charge was for VBucks on Fortnite,” dated May 7, 2019, a couple of months before Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and died in Aug. 2019. But the sender and receiver of that alert have been redacted. Epstein’s emails were not redacted by the DOJ, suggesting that whoever got this email was not Epstein.
Curiously, there is a $5 charge on one of Epstein’s credit card statements in the files, dated May 31, 2018. The charge was credited back the next day. That file, EFTA01671962 from Data Set 10, has been deleted from the DOJ website for unknown reasons.
The available account trackers online show that the littlestjeff1 account on Fortnite has been set to private. But that didn’t stop Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman from Georgia who resigned after having a fight with President Donald Trump about the release of the Epstein files, elevated the conspiracy theory in a tweet on Thursday.
‼️ https://t.co/N2yCMj2r8C
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 6, 2026
But Fortnite wrote in a tweet on Friday that a user changed their name to make it look like they were Epstein, confirming that it was a hoax:
Hey Official Fortnite here – this was a ruse by a Fortnite player. A few days ago, an existing Fortnite account owner changed their username from something totally unrelated to littlestjeff1, following the revelation of littlestjeff1 as a name on YouTube. These Fortnite trackers only display your current name, not any prior changes to it.
We have no record of the subject’s email addresses referenced in the public document existing in the Epic account system. Since the public document releases, people have created Fortnite accounts with similar-looking email addresses and user names.
That settles that, though people are likely to still believe Epstein is alive. One reason is that an image that makes it look like Epstein is alive in Tel Aviv has been doing the rounds.
Gizmodo ran the image through Gemini, which identified a SynthID watermark, indicating it was created with one of Google’s AI products. The watermark is invisible to the naked eye, but shows up when it’s run through Gemini. But you don’t even need to run the image through AI if you take a look at the star in the bottom-right corner, assuming you see a version where it hasn’t been cropped out.
That’s the Gemini logo, which we’ve circled in red above, an indication to the naked eye that it is indeed an AI-generated image.
There’s also some fuckery happening with Epstein’s old accounts, as some people on social media have claimed they accessed his Outlook account after finding a password in the recently released files. Needless to say, you should not try to sign into Epstein’s old accounts. Doing so is a federal crime, and you could get into some serious trouble.
There are some extremely weird things in the Epstein files. After all, he was engaged in a very real conspiracy to traffic girls. But the theory that his death was faked is by far the least plausible of everything circulating online right now. It seems likely that Epstein didn’t kill himself, given all the inconsistencies and shady bullshit going on at the jail that held him. CBS News reported Friday that the noose Epstein allegedly used has never been identified, and a noose found at the scene was determined in a DOJ Inspector General’s report not be the one that killed him.
But whether he killed himself or not, he’s almost certainly dead. And we know for sure that he’s not playing Fortnite, dead or alive.
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