Claim review · Rating: False (altered image) · Updated 2026-10-26

The "fall off" image of Michelle Obama swapped her face with her brother’s

Short answer: Lead Stories reports that the image is an edited promotional picture for the IMO podcast in which the faces of Michelle Obama and her older brother, Craig Robinson, were switched. It was posted on X on March 13, 2025, the day after the original promo clip appeared on TikTok, by Lead Stories’ dates.

Updated 2026-10-26. Part of the larger review: what the originals show.

The claim

A post on X showed an image of two people and a caption saying that Michelle Obama had visibly aged badly in March 2025. Lead Stories reports that the image shows no such thing: it was altered.

Side by side: the promo and the edit

Original
Not hosted here.
Use the source link below.

ORIGINALA short promotional clip on the @imopodcasts TikTok account, March 12, 2025, featuring Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. TikTok post (Lead Stories gives the date; the clip belongs to its makers, so it is linked, not hosted).

Altered copy
Not hosted here.
Use the source link below.

ALTEREDAn image posted on X on 2025-03-13 (UTC), per Lead Stories, who captured it at 15:37 UTC that day. The post on X (linked as the record of the edit, not as a recommendation to open it; we do not name the poster and do not host the image).

About the photograph

Left: Craig Robinson, smiling, in a pinstripe suit. Right: Michelle Obama, smiling, in her 2009 official White House portrait. Two separate, unaltered photographs placed side by side. — THE TWO PEOPLEThe two people whose faces were swapped, in two separate, unaltered photographs placed side by side. Left: Craig Robinson, cropped from the official group photograph taken in the Blue Room of the White House on January 20, 2013 (Pete Souza; the published caption lists Craig Robinson first from the left). Right: Michelle Obama, official White House portrait of February 18, 2009 (Joyce Boghosian). Both are public domain (U.S. federal government works); cropped and reduced. Neither is the podcast promo, and the swapped image is not hosted. File page on Wikimedia Commons · Second file page

What the originals say

Lead Stories (March 13, 2025): "The altered promotional Image for ‘IMO,’ a podcast featuring Michelle Obama and her older brother Craig Robinson, has the faces of the two hosts switched." It publishes a composite of a screenshot from the start of the TikTok clip beside the edited image. Lead Stories (secondary)
Lead Stories describes the podcast as "a podcast from Higher Ground Media," which it says was founded by Michelle and Barack Obama. Lead Stories
The episode page for the same podcast lists her and Craig Robinson as the hosts. IMO episode page
The post’s address contains a number, 1900064812287045636. Decoding that number by the standard X (Snowflake) rule gives a creation time of 2025-03-13 06:02 UTC, that is, March 12, 2025 at 11:02 PM Pacific time. The date in Lead Stories is the UTC date. This is our own arithmetic, not a statement by X. Post on X

What we could not confirm

We have not looked at the TikTok clip frame by frame or compared the edited image to it ourselves. The side-by-side is Lead Stories’s.
We cannot say who made the edit. We have not named the account that posted it.
We have not checked whether the post is still online.

What was changed, in plain terms

Element	Original	Edit
Faces	Each person has their own face	The two faces are switched
Setting	A promo for a podcast	Presented as how she looks in March 2025

How the image spread

2025-03-12: The promo clip is posted on TikTok. TikTok
2025-03-13: The edited image is posted on X; Lead Stories publishes its check the same day. Lead Stories

Sources

Primary

Secondary context only (fact-checkers and reference)

Photo credit and license

Craig Robinson, cropped from White House photo P012013PS-0665 by Pete Souza, 2013-01-20 (license: public domain; file: Commons) and Michelle Obama, official portrait by Joyce Boghosian, 2009-02-18 (license: public domain; file: Commons).

How we know

Find the post and the claim it makes.
Find the original source that the image seems to come from: the podcast’s own promo.
Read the fact-checker’s composite and description of the edit.
Date both items with their own timestamps and convert to Pacific time.
State the limit: we rely on Lead Stories for the comparison.

Change log

Date	Change
2026-10-26	First version of this page.

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