CLAIM: A photo shows a police booking photo of U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock following an arrest two decades ago.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Altered photo. The image has been manipulated to place Warnock’s face in the police booking photo. Warnock’s campaign confirmed to The Associated Press that the image is fake. The picture of the Democratic senator used in the manipulated image appears to be a screenshot from a 2017 television interview.
THE FACTS: As the closely watched Dec. 6 runoff election for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia approaches, the incumbent senator’s past encounters with police have again become a target for his opponents.
Some on social media are sharing what they claim is a police mugshot from Warnock’s arrest related to allegations he obstructed a 2002 child abuse investigation. The image purports to show him holding a letterboard that says: “Police Dept.,” “R. Warnock,” and “July 31, 2002.”
“GA finest the Reverend Warnock,” wrote one Twitter user in a post that included the black and white image and has been shared or liked more than 11,000 times as of Friday.
But a reverse image search shows the widely shared photo isn’t from a decades-old arrest, but was created using a screenshot from a more recent television appearance.
Warnock’s thin, rectangular-framed eyeglasses, facial hair and the glare illuminating part of his face match frames from a 2017 interview with 11Alive, an NBC-affiliate in Atlanta.
In the roughly two-minute clip, Warnock, who is pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, discussed his arrest that year alongside other religious leaders for holding a prayer protest in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda over healthcare cuts in then-President Donald Trump’s proposed budget.
And while Warnock was also arrested on July 31, 2002, the image circulating online in recent days does not show a booking photo stemming from that encounter.
In 2002, Warnock, who was 33 at the time, and another official with the Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore were charged with obstructing a state police investigation into allegations of abuse at the church’s Camp Farthest Out in rural Maryland.
State police at the time said Warnock and the other church official weren’t involved in the alleged abuse, which involved mistreatment of a young camper, but had interfered with officer attempts to question the teenage counselors without a lawyer present.
Prosecutors eventually moved to drop the charges against the two, calling it a “miscommunication.”
The Carroll County district attorney’s office this week deferred questions to Maryland State Police, which said it could not verify the widely circulating photo. The agency declined to elaborate.
But Warnock’s campaign maintained the image circulating online this week isn’t authentic. The campaign confirmed in an emailed statement to the AP that the photo is fake, but declined to respond to follow-up questions.
Republican challenger Herschel Walker has brought up the 2002 incident in campaign ads, and it was also a focus during Warnock’s initial run in 2020.
Still other social media users insisted the mugshot could have come from a more recent incident in which Warnock’s then-wife claimed he’d run over her foot with his car during a 2020 domestic dispute in Atlanta, where he now lives.
“Reverend Raphael Warnock mug shot after he had beaten his wife & run over her with his car>>hardly holier than thou!!!!!!,” wrote one Twitter user.
But Atlanta police rejected that notion as well. Officers responding to the incident noted no visible injuries to the woman’s foot and no charges were ultimately filed, meaning there was no booking photo, the department said in an email Thursday.
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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.
Read More: Fake Warnock mugshot circulates ahead of Georgia Senate runoff