Rumors of FBI letters threatening trans public figures center on an AI-generated document

A copy of the alleged letter provided to The Needle’s reporting team is illegitimate, putting the entire claim of recent FBI letters into question.

By Jane Migliara Brigham & Artemis T. Douglas

Editor’s Note: Jane was responsible for the investigation involved with this piece, with some help in writing the article from Artemis.

Over the last two weeks, rumors have been circulating online that the FBI is targeting visibly trans public figures with threatening letters. These claims are serious, and The Needle, among others, have been attempting to verify them.

One source told The Needle that these letters caused great fear in themselves and their family.

While no credible evidence has been made public in a widespread way at time of writing, what can be sourced is that people are scared.

If you dig into the history of the FBI, it’s not unusual for them to send threatening letters to activists and others with a public profile. They did it to Martin Luther King, Jr, and have done it to others.

One person with a large following who has publicly posted about receiving one of these alleged letters is Tara Knight. Knight is a self-declared transfeminist, an author, and a public figure with 42 thousand followers on instagram. She also has platforms on Substack, Bluesky, and Tiktok. She is among the most prominent and vocal of the people claiming to have received letters from the FBI.

The Alleged FBI Letter

The Needle reached out to Knight as part of our investigation into these letters.  After Jane told her we were preparing to run a story that stated there was no evidence of these letters, and asked Knight for comment, Knight offered to send a copy which was blurred for her safety and which had any identifying information removed. The Needle agreed to fully redact any non-public identifying information within anything we received before publishing it.

What was received was an obvious fake that was almost certainly made or edited with AI image generation software. Not only was the letter consistent with AI image generation, multiple sources who The Needle reached out to explained that image blurring alone could not have made the image we were provided.

Here is what we received, exactly as we received it:

The document was also sent in a way that it could only be viewed once and not saved, making further validations of its authenticity effectively impossible. This is similar to how Snapchat sends messages that are meant to be seen once before being deleted.

The only reason we have the document at all was because when Jane received it from Knight, she accidentally left the tab open. Once we became suspicious of the authenticity of the letter, only then did she take a screenshot.

Whether or not Knight believes the letter is real, the letter itself has several markers of being illegitimate. Those include skewed text, a misaligned FBI seal, missing key markers of proper FBI letterhead, and other clear tells. The text is also illegible, even with use of advanced, highly accurate character recognition software.

The most immediate problem is that the writing on the letter is completely off center from the paper itself, but appears to be lined up with the center of the frame on which the paper is shown.  There is a large empty gap on the left side of the paper that is not mirrored on the right side. This is consistent with how AI image generation deals with large bodies of text. It generates the background (the paper itself), and then fills in the detail in the foreground later (the text). This is likely why the paper and text are not aligned.

The FBI seal at the top of the letter looks like the real thing from a distance, but upon closer inspection, has several inconsistencies that mean it is both not really from the FBI and could not have been the result of image blurring.  The seal in the image has 12 smudges which correspond to stars on the seal, placed at roughly equal distances, not unlike the 12 numbers on an analog clock.  The real FBI seal has 13 stars spaced roughly evenly apart.  For the seal in the image to be a picture of the real seal, the blurring would have had to delete one of the stars while moving the other twelve so that they are equidistant from one another.  This is highly unlikely.

Another inconsistent detail is that the seal in the image has writing over the whole outer circle, whereas the writing on the true seal has two distinct gaps in the writing, so as to distinguish between the phrases “Department of Justice” and “Federal Bureau of Investigation”.

The most damning evidence can be found in what is supposed to be the text of the document.  This text isn't just mostly unreadable, the readability of the text varies wildly. The final sentence has several words which are both legible and can be read as part of a complete clause, while the entire first paragraph is unreadable gibberish. Image blurring would have lowered the resolution at a uniform rate and made the text softer, but not in such an inconsistent manner. The thickness of the letters also varies wildly, indicating that sections were not created from a single font, as standard letterheads tend to be.

Differences of this kind are a common feature of AI generated text in images, which struggles to generate legible text within the image itself.

The opening paragraph does not have a single legible word.

In the first paragraph is a supposed letter that doesn’t exist in the Latin alphabet. This is similar enough to the letters ‘l’ and ‘t’ that an AI might make this when trying to write that, but no image blurring software would create something like that here without any similar artifacts on the other nearby letters.

The most legible line in the whole thing merges the “b” in “alibi” and the different case “B” in “Bundle” to make a combined word that might read “aliBundle”. This appears to be an attempt to create the name “Bundle of Styx”, the handle that Knight posts under. However, the word “Styx” is clearly and obviously misspelled, with the word being clearly legible as “syyx”.  The “y” that should have been a “t” is nearly identical to the y next to it that is in the proper place. It beggars belief that the FBI would send a threat to someone without first double checking whether they had spelled their username correctly.  However, it should be noted that the letters “t” and “y” are next to one another on a standard keyboard, meaning that someone who typed up a prompt quickly could have made the mistake if they did not check if everything was spelled correctly before sending it out.

This line can’t manage to keep a proper density in the word apparently meant to be “confirmation”, with the “nfir” missing and an erased-looking “m” in their place. It also merges the “c” and “e” in the word that appears to be “compliance”. There are more typos and missing characters, such as in the first word that is probably supposed to read “provide”. Once again, even the legible parts of the document are littered with typos.

In short: The writing on the document is smudgy, with uneven line heights, text characters, and character spacing. The FBI seal isn’t scaled in a way that matches the text– and isn’t the correct seal. The seal is also in the wrong position on the page and the issuing department information and address in the letter are absent altogether. The text itself, at least the bits that can be read, makes no sense. Typos, weird punctuation, and other artefacts in the slightly–more-legible pieces of text show likely AI hallucinations. Moreover, the watermark for the specific FBI department which would be present in a legitimate FBI-issued letter simply doesn’t exist in the provided alleged letter.

In addition, The Needle used advanced offline OCR, or optical character recognition, tools to attempt to extract the original text from the illegible image. What could be extracted was not real words, with less than 10% average confidence per word/phrase extracted.

The text that could be extracted by one of the OCR tools employed in The Needle’s analysis is as follows:

Extracted Text:

• Danea elTo =raithc
• Tdliema 4h=IEO3EUkAR
• Ixa ati
• Jcmp1pFI Me
• ei
• Ine (ot
• Glmiv
• Wt
• JIaLR ALOR I
• cal
• 024"
• F Whe
• Ihe & AII fby
• Diuallc "
• yuu eu Jual
• Iesnli e0
• Cm
• OO
• Tha Tara Kuight Erown 6y the & lie clie udk ofS)r* ;
• Actuonleslsiz noiyolb
• (tukn (0 malon
• ol compllanc ot
• Joue eelly
• PL_Uu
• 0i
• poid

In other words, even highly tuned data extraction tools can’t make a legible letter from the provided evidence. The tool also provides a confidence level for its text extraction, which, after accounting for the single outlier, has a 9.52% average confidence rating across all extracted lines. What that means is that the software’s ability to accurately identify the text is less than 10% in this specific case based on the statistics involved.

Even without these issues, even if the letter was perfectly readable, and the text wasn’t molested by generative AI, there are further markers of its illegitimacy.

Namely, the specific letterhead style the FBI actually uses isn't shown. According to Legal Clarity, an organization that works to make legal jargon and analysis into “plain language anyone can understand”,

“Official FBI letterhead begins with the bold, centered words “FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION” printed at the top of the page. The header also includes the parent agency, the “United States Department of Justice,” and the primary Washington, D.C. address for FBI Headquarters. The document consistently features the official seal: a blue field, a shield with red and white stripes, and a gold-outlined strip bearing the words “DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE” and “FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.”

Legitimate correspondence includes specific internal markings for tracking and authentication. These include a clear date, a formal reference to the relevant case file number, and the specific FBI Field Office or division responsible for the communication. The absence of these formal identifiers, or the presence of poor grammar and misspellings, indicates a fraudulent document.”

The below screenshot is of a legitimate letter from the FBI, albeit not from FBI Headquarters, but rather their Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

A full example of this legitimate letter from the FBI, albeit heavily redacted, is below:

The evidence provided is therefore low-quality and illegitimate, which makes it even harder to verify the exact nature of the specific, alleged threat that the FBI has supposedly sent to various trans creators.

However, if the photo provided is a genuine capture of these “FBI letters”, then what can be gathered is that the FBI letters themselves are illegitimate.

Knight stated prior to sending this alleged letter she would blur the overall image and blackout her personal information. She also stated in no uncertain terms that the letter sent to The Needle was a blurred image of the original FBI letter. However, image blurring alone doesn’t explain all of these artefacts. Only AI image generation does.

When The Needle confronted Knight with the fact that what she provided has multiple markers of illegitimacy and of being not from the FBI, Knight denied that the letter was fake, and accused The Needle of being “blasphemous” by doubting her. 

Knight also threatened to “post this conversation” in regards to the private messages between her and Jane. Before we at The Needle could finish sourcing and fact-checking every element of this story and get it prepared for publishing, Knight wrote an essay on her substack titled “Journalists Aren’t Your Friends” in which she stated that “A journalist from The Needle implying I fabricated an FBI document (federal crime btw) is not an anomaly.”

A lawyer that The Needle reached out to about this case stated that if Tara were to attempt to pass off the document in question as real in a legal context, she might be charged with the crimes of forgery and/or impersonating a police officer, both of which are felonies.

We went into such extreme detail explaining how this document is fake because the document she sent to us is the only alleged proof so far provided about a supposed FBI crackdown on trans content. This is the only “evidence” that has turned up of this happening. If real FBI cease-and-desist letters are really being sent to trans creators, what Knight provided to The Needle would still not be an example of a real letter from the FBI.

Timeline of Events

The posts about these letters are causing a widespread panic of an FBI crackdown among trans people with no evidence to support it. Tara Knight has been the most vocal about having received such a letter, and much of the support from the public regarding this specific issue seems to have gone to her.

On Jan. 6, after claiming to receive one of these letters, Knight claimed that the FBI is specifically threatening her platform, and also that the FBI is alleging that she is somehow a propagandist for domestic terrorism.  

Quoting from her instagram post on the matter:

So as you all have likely heard, I was forwarded a letter from the FBI informing me that my work and my platform and everything I’ve built over the past three years has to go; for propagating what they are calling “radical gender ideology”. This comes from Trump’s Executive Order… basically saying that I’m a propagandist for domestic… September eleventh… thing… I’ll just say it point blank, short, period: I have no intentions of stopping anything. Maybe to my detriment, but I've never been the smartest one. That’s all I’m gonna say on this.

She followed this up with a post saying that she expected her instagram page to be taken down, as this is her primary platform.  She then directs her followers to her other platforms on TikTok, Substack, and Bluesky.

The next day, Jan. 7, Knight did an interview with Sophie From Mars about the letter she claims to have received.

Sophie From Mars is best known among trans women for being credibly accused of rape by five people who knew her. In a since-deleted twitter post, Sophie partially confirms these accusations. The Needle can’t find evidence that attests to Tara Knight publicly speaking about this issue with anyone other than Sophie From Mars, outside of her own platforms.

In the interview (released Jan. 14), before even discussing the FBI letter, she talks about her upcoming book on the exclusion of trans women from community structures. She insinuates but does not outright state that the FBI letter is in response to the release of this book.

She also addresses the distrust that she was already facing at this time, comparing them to the allegations that Sophie had been accused of two years earlier. A wrinkle in this comparison comes from allegations posted on Tumblr that Knight mostly used her successful ‘flee the US’ Gofundme to buy fast food from Doordash, and didn’t actually flee the US with it. The Needle can’t confirm how the Gofundme funds were spent, but Knight’s 2 year old crowdfunding campaign for this purpose is still up on Gofundme’s website at time of reporting.

Also, as mentioned above, Sophie From Mars partially confessed to the sexual assault she was accused of, and which Knight uses as an example of unjust exclusion from community support.

Later that day, in a since deleted instagram post, she states that she will not speak about this matter with any journalists, and will not be releasing the letter in question. 

On Jan. 8, Knight published an essay discussing the dangers of not believing trans women. In the essay, entitled “Whisper Networks, State Power, MLK and the Discipline of Transsexual Women”, she compares her situation of being threatened by the FBI to similar threats that the FBI made against Martin Luther King Jr. She concludes by stating that if trans women want to avoid the persecution of the US government, they will have to stop spreading bad information about one another, since in her view this is the primary tool of the FBI.

Quoting from the conclusion:

“The FBI used whisper networks to weaken movements without appearing to touch them. That strategy remains available to anyone willing to wield it. The question is not whether the method exists. The question is who benefits when it runs, and who gets fed into it when the room decides it needs to feel clean again.

If survival, power, and continuity for transsexual women matter, then rumor has to be treated as a weapon. That means standards. That means restraint. That means refusing to repeat what you can’t verify just because repeating makes you feel like you’re doing something. That means recognizing when “concern” slides into control.”

The essay acknowledges that the FBI letter itself is a powerful tool in getting people to stop resisting, but ultimately concludes that the real risk to trans women is people gossiping about one another.

On Jan. 9, Knight posted a video to Instagram stating “officially confirmed by the federal government being a bad bih is revolutionary asf”.

What this pattern shows is someone who claims to have received a frightening threat and is leaning into her own visibility in response, making the alleged threat part of her personal brand.

Motivations and Response

Her motivations and actions around this letter make no sense. A letter from the FBI is not a gag order. In almost all cases, letters from the FBI are not legally prevented from being shared. By stating that she will not release the letter in question, she is saying that it is safe for her to widely publicize her supposedly having received the letter, to the point that it is now part of her branding, but that it is not safe to provide any details as to the contents of the letter, beyond that she will not comply with a supposed cease-and-desist order which is contained within it. She has also never provided details about how she received the letter, such as the date she first saw it, or when it was sent out.

She is claiming that by not deleting her public platform in defiance of a threat from the federal government, she is acting heroically, and compares her situation to that of MLK. At the same time, she claims that if she revealed the specific contents of the letter that she has loudly declared that she is defying, she would be in profound legal trouble. She has gone so far in asserting this as to say that journalists trying to obtain evidence from her (that was us) are attempting to “entrap” her. 

She is saying that by asking her to provide evidence that her claims are true, we are attempting to trick her into admitting fault and/or committing a crime, not unlike the police do. This only makes sense if publicizing the contents of the letter is a crime, but publicizing the existence of the letter is not.

Unless it is a National Security Letter (NSL), the letter itself doesn’t have the power to compel silence from its recipient under force of law. And if it is an NSL, merely posting about receiving it would violate the enforced silence surrounding it, and therefore leave her open to prosecution.

An NSL is a subpoena that can bypass the normal court process and compel its recipient to testify, provide evidence, or take other actions under threat of law as well as serve as a type of gag order demanding silence regarding receiving it. An NSL would not allow a recipient to publicize that they received the letter and bar them from revealing the contents of the letter itself.  These are total silence orders.

An anonymous guest writer for the Washington Post wrote in 2007 surrounding their experience of receiving an NSL.

“Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case – including the mere fact that I received an NSL – from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.”

Essentially, if the letter is real and legitimate while also being an NSL letter, Knight’s decision to post about receiving it is itself opening up criminal charges. Logically then, it either isn’t an NSL, or Knight has already invited criminal risk upon herself before a single person asked her for evidence. The full reasons for why she refuses to provide evidence of what she did receive remain unclear.

Community Response

The response of people to Knight’s claims has been largely one of support, with people on Tumblr and Bluesky alike encouraging others to donate money to Knight as she faces this.

However, over a week after Knight first claims to have received a letter, the claim itself remains unsourced. Alison Chapman and Alejandra Carabello have both posted about an inability to find anyone willing to come forward about these letters.

Chapman used Bluesky to state that, “I have had folks message me concerned and scared because of them. Please provide evidence before spreading information like this.”

Further, Carabello even made a claim that if the FBI was indeed going after visible trans content creators with threatening letters, logically she should have received them too– “I've not gotten some letter like this nor any other high profile trans person I know. This wild rumor has been circulating and no one can substantiate it. Seems like a game of telephone that's inducing panic.”

This is consistent with the general pattern of people claiming to have received letters from the FBI.  All of these accusations which The Needle has found evidence of originated on Instagram, and are made by young creators that appear to target a young trans audience.

Another content creator by the handle Poorhottie posted on instagram claiming to receive such a letter in retaliation for making pro-trans content on the platform.

The first letter she shows as evidence is marked with what appears to be a letter clearly marked with the British Royal Coat of Arms. Not a US government seal, but one from the United Kingdom. It should go without saying that the British Government does not run the FBI.

The Needle reached out to the creator for comment, but did not receive an answer.

Conclusion

In short, even without the low-quality, illegible alleged evidence provided to The Needle, there is no credible evidence that these letters are real. What The Needle was provided does not change this assertion.

It is not impossible for the FBI to do what has been claimed. As mentioned above, the FBI has a history of shady and threatening behavior towards equal rights activists. However, that does not mean that the people claiming to have been threatened are telling the truth.

It is irresponsible to spread panic among marginalized people through rumors without evidence. Our communities don’t need to be worked into a frenzy by uncritical sharing of baseless and/or false claims. We have enough real threats to worry about.

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