A photo (here, here and here) has been making its rounds on social media, purporting to show Sasha and Malia Obama’s ‘real’ parents – a man and a woman who are clearly not Barack and Michelle Obama. The photo has been shared with the claim that these individuals are the actual parents of Sasha and Malia. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The viral photo shows Sasha and Malia Obama’s real parents.
Fact: The viral photo is an edited version of an original image, which features Barack and Michelle Obama, not the alleged parents. The original, unedited photograph is from 2015 and is available on the official government website, Obamalibrary.gov. Hence, the claim made in the post is rated as False.
The image was manipulated to replace the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama with those of Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbit in a family portrait taken in 2015.
To ascertain the authenticity of the viral photo, we carried out a reverse image search. This search led us to Obamalibrary.gov, where we found the original, unedited photograph. It features Barack and Michelle Obama posing with Sasha and Malia in the Rose Garden of the White House in April 2015.
The viral photo, in contrast, has been manipulated to remove the dogs from the scene and to replace the bodies of Barack and Michelle Obama with those of another couple.
Further reverse image search revealed that the couple inserted into the viral image is Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt. Anita Blanchard is a gynaecologist, and Martin Nesbitt is the Chairman of the Obama Foundation. A 2008 article from The New York Times identifies them as close friends of the Obama family. You can see the original photo of this couple that was used in the viral edited photo here.
The claim that Blanchard and Nesbitt are the biological parents of Sasha and Malia Obama is an old debunked hoax (here and here). Other fact-checkers have previously refuted this claim (here and here).
To sum up, the viral photo alleging to showcase the ‘real’ parents of Sasha and Malia Obama is a manipulated image.
