No proof Kamala Harris injured pedestrian in 2011 car crash

On Sept. 2, a website styled to look like a news organization known as “KBSF San Francisco News” posted a story about a hit-and-run crash cover-up implicating Vice President Kamala Harris. Within two days, the baseless claims had spread widely on X. 

In video clips shared Sept. 4 on X, a woman identified as “Alicia Brown” claimed Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, drove a car that struck and injured her June 7, 2011. 

“Well it happened on the corner of Post Street and Jones Street,” the woman recounted. “Me and my mom were walking home from the movie theater after watching ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’”

She said a car driving the wrong way down a one-way street struck her as she crossed the road. She was thrown into the road, where she observed the woman who hit her looking back at her before driving away from the scene.

“Of course, back then, I didn’t know that it was Kamala Harris, California attorney general,” the woman said.

Harris was in her first year as attorney general in 2011. A voice-over said the woman injured her pelvis, ribs and spine in the crash and underwent 11 surgeries but never regained her ability to walk. 

The day after the incident, Brown said two men talked with her mom at the hospital. 

“When my mom came back to me I asked, ‘Who are those people?’ She said that the woman who hit me was Kamala Harris, a very powerful woman and those men were her people,” the woman said. “She was told that if this story gets out we would be in very big trouble, and if she loves me, she shouldn’t report this or look for any justice.”

The claim emerged from a blog post on a website identifying itself as “KBSF San Francisco News.” That website was unresponsive by midday Sept. 4, but the source code on an archived version of the story showed that the video and the story were posted around 6 a.m. Sept. 2.

By around 11 a.m. Sept. 3, the narrative was being amplified by a member of a pro-Donald Trump “meme” account network and paid subscribers on X.

(Screenshot from archived KBSF-tv.com website)

A woman and news station with no history, a crash with no documentation

KBSF is not a reputable San Francisco news outlet. 

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television communications and maintains a register of TV stations, has no record of KBSF. The domain name www.kbsf-tv.com was created Aug. 20.  

The video identified the woman as “Alicia Brown,” but the KBSF story that accompanied it also spelled Brown’s name “Alisha Brown,” so we checked that, too. 

We found no WhitePages.com records for a person living in San Francisco for either name. Google searches before Sept. 1 did not show an “Alicia Brown” or “Alisha Brown” in California who matched the woman in the video. 

The intersection of Post and Jones streets  — where Brown said the purported incident occurred — exists. Google Maps confirmed the location was within walking distance of a movie theater in 2011. 

San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Allison Maxie said the agency found no calls for service or other reports involving a hit-and-run or car crash in the vicinity of the intersection of Post and Jones streets on or around this date in 2011. 

“Our search for such an incident turned up with negative results,” Maxie said. “We believe there is no merit to this incident.”

Because the woman in the video claimed her mother had been intimidated into silence, our search went beyond police records. 

We used Google and Nexis to search and found: 

• No results in Nexis news archives for an “Alicia Brown” or “Alisha Brown” involved in a 2011 hit-and-run car crash in California. 

• Four results when searching “Kamala” with the phrase hit-and-run in 2011, but none of those reports said Harris had been driving. Each mention was included in a news story about California crime statistics or multitopic stories that, in a separate section, identified Harris as California’s attorney general. 

• No Google results for hit-and-run crashes near the intersection in June 2011.

The woman in the video claimed that she decided to go public with her story after her mother died. But we found no recent obituaries naming an Alicia Brown or Alisha Brown as a surviving daughter. 

Video contains image of a 2018 Guam crash, other unrelated scenes

The video includes generic images that are linked to other incidents or could have been pulled off the internet and used as generic stock photos. 

For example, about one minute into the full video, KBSF showed a picture of a car with a broken mirror and windshield. 

But that photo was from a 2018 crash in Guam involving a Toyota Yaris that struck a pedestrian, Pacific Daily News reported.

(Screenshot from video on X)

The video also showed two X-ray images about three minutes in. Using Bing reverse-image searches, we found that one, showing multiple rib fractures, was published in an October 2010 article in BMC Gastroenterology about Cronkhite-Canada syndrome causing rib fractures.

The other shows a “type C pelvic ring injury in a 12-year-old girl,” according to a 2017 article in the Journal of Children’s Orthopaedics. 

No evidence that video is AI-generated, experts say

Digital forensics experts told PolitiFact that based on their analysis, the clips of “Alicia Brown” don’t appear to be generated by artificial intelligence.

“I think most likely this is a good old fashioned (and not particularly well done or convincing) cheap fake where the interview is simply staged,” said Hany Farid, University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics and misinformation.

Siwei Lyu, a computer science and engineering professor at the University at Buffalo, performed an algorithmic and visual analysis of the video and “cannot confirm the video itself was created with generative AI.” AI models have difficulty producing sighing and slurring sounds that he found in the audio. Features like inconsistent teeth in the mouth area, which are usually markers for AI-generated content, are also absent, he said. 

Meme accounts, paid X subscribers circulated false claim

On X, the earliest mention of the claim that we found seemed to be a post from an X user named Liz Churchill. Churchill describes herself as a “conspiracy theorist” in her bio and is also a paid X subscriber, meaning her posts are promoted by the site’s algorithm. The original post is now unavailable, but a cached copy can be found here. The cached version’s time stamp is 3 p.m., but we found posts that reshared the now-deleted post before 11 a.m. ET. 

The X post linked to the KBSF-TV article and said, “Kamala Harris was involved in a ‘hit and run’ accident in 2011 where she hit a 13-year old.”

(Screenshot from X)

Minutes later, a paid X account called “miguelifornia” shared the article link and a screenshot of the headline, then made another post including the video. The second post drew more than 700,000 views. In the next two hours, the video was shared by a paid X subscriber called  “I Meme Therefore I Am,” gaining 11,000 reposts and more than 1.8 million views. After the Baltimore bridge collapse in March, that account spread an anti-Ukraine narrative. 

Miguelifornia is part of a network of “meme” accounts supported by the “Dilley Meme Team,” also known as “Trump’s Online War Machine,” which previously circulated a deepfake video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropping out of the presidential race. Former President Donald Trump, Harris’ rival for the presidency, has been found to have interacted with the group, whether by resharing their content or suggesting edits to one of the videos they produced.

Our ruling

A viral video claimed that Harris was involved in a June 7, 2011, hit-and-run crash in San Francisco that injured a woman named Alicia Brown.

We found no evidence that any of this is real. The story emerged from a website that claimed to share news from a TV channel that does not exist. We couldn’t find a person matching the supposed crash victim’s identity. The San Francisco Police Department searched its records and found no incident reports or emergency calls matching the described crash. Multiple images shared in the video were traced to unrelated incidents including a car crash in Guam and images published in medical research journals. 

We found no evidence to substantiate this hit-and-run claim. We rate it Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.