News report about Kamala Harris 2011 hit-and-run is fake

Viral posts online claim Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run crash in 2011 that left a 13-year-old paralyzed. The posts link to what appears to be an article from a San Francisco television station called KBSF-TV.

The article’s headline reads, “Kamala Harris hit a 13-year-old girl with a car and left the crime scene.” The article claims Harris hit a teenage girl named Alicia Brown as the girl was crossing a San Francisco street in June of 2011. Harris was the attorney general of California at that time. 

The article and social media posts about the alleged incident also feature a video that appears to show an interview with the alleged victim coming forward now that Harris has become the Democratic presidential nominee. 

Several people on social media, as well as VERIFY readers Mat, Joanne and Charlotte, asked if the report is real.

THE QUESTION

Is a news report about Kamala Harris being involved in a 2011 hit-and-run in San Francisco real?

THE SOURCES

• The San Francisco Police Department
• Federal Communications Commission
• GoDaddy.com domain registry data
• KBSF-TV.com archives captured by The Wayback Machine
• Photo from a USA TODAY news report from 2018
• Photo of a pelvic X-ray from a Journal of Children’s Orthopaedics article
• Photo of a chest X-ray from a case report on Cronkhite-Canada syndrome
• InVid and RevEye, video and photo forensics tools

THE ANSWER

No, a news report about Kamala Harris being involved in a 2011 hit-and-run in San Francisco is not real. It’s fake.

WHAT WE FOUND

The KBSF-TV report claiming Kamala Harris was involved in a 2011 hit-and-run in San Francisco that left a young girl disabled is fake. San Francisco police say there are no reports this incident ever occurred. KBSF-TV, the website where the rumor first appeared, is not a real news organization and the article has since been deleted.

A spokesperson with the San Francisco Police Department told VERIFY that “based on information provided about the claim, no incident reports or calls for service were found.”

“We believe there is no merit to this incident,” a police spokesperson said. 

VERIFY searched through news archives from June 2011 for a hit-and-run involving Harris or  Alicia Brown in San Francisco and found no reputable news outlets reporting of such an incident. 

The unfounded claim stems from a fake news article published to a fake news website. There is no record of KBSF existing as a news outlet, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television stations in the U.S.

VERIFY looked up domain information for https://kbsf-tv.com, the website where the fake news article was published. According to the domain registry, the website was created on Aug. 20, 2024, which is an indicator this website was created with the purpose of spreading disinformation. Legitimate news organizations typically have established websites that have existed for decades. 

We analyzed the content of the website itself and found several other red flags that the website is not reputable. As of Sept. 4, the website was deleted but pages of the website were captured through website archiving site The Wayback Machine. 

An archive of the homepage captured on Aug. 21 appears to show the website prior to any news content being added. The page was created using blog host WordPress, the archive shows, and at the time was named “San Francisco Bay News.” Sometime between Aug. 21 and Sept. 3, when the last archive was captured, the page name was changed to “KBSF - San Francisco News.” 

The article and video about the hit-and-run also include images that were lifted from other websites. 

Using RevEye, a reverse image search tool, VERIFY traced the image of the shattered windshield seen in the fake article to a USA TODAY article from 2018 about a crash in Guam.

At about two minutes into the video accompanying the fake news report, X-rays appearing to show “injuries to the pelvis, ribs and spine,” don’t actually show injuries to the alleged victim of a hit-and-run. 

Using InVid, a video forensics tool, VERIFY isolated the frames with the X-ray images and conducted another reverse image search. The same picture of the pelvic fracture X-ray can be seen in this Journal of Children’s Orthopaedics article that shows a C pelvic ring injury in a 12-year-old girl. The photo of the chest X-ray was lifted from a case report on Cronkhite-Canada syndrome.

VERIFY reached out to the Harris campaign for comment but did not hear back at the time of publication.