A rumor that circulated online in August 2025 claimed that the comedian and talk-show host Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, quietly adopted a young girl who lost her parents in the July 2025 Texas floods. According to the story, the reported adoption not only expanded the Colbert family but also helped heal the wounds of an earlier miscarriage the couple reportedly suffered.
Snopes readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true. One reader, who was evidently already suspicious that the claim contained elements generated using artificial-intelligence, wrote, “I saw what I think is AI on facebook that Stephen Colbert & his wife adopted a girl who lost her family in Texas floods.”
For example, on Aug. 9, 2025, USA Pulse Today posted (archived) the story, receiving more than 14,000 likes. The post displayed pictures of what appeared to be Colbert, McGee-Colbert and a young girl. The story began, “‘SHE’S OUR DAUGHTER NOW.’ — Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, have quietly adopted a young girl who lost her parents in the Texas floods.”
Other Facebook users also shared the same claim (archived, archived, archived). We found Facebook posts about the rumor dating back to Aug. 6, though it appeared to have begun circulating sometime earlier: An X user asked (archived) X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok about the claim days before that. Some posts featured links in top comments leading to articles hosted by WordPress blogs.
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting about the Colberts’ alleged adoption (archived, archived, archived, archived). Prominent news media outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.
Colbert has never publicly confirmed that he and his wife suffered a miscarriage, as online posts sharing the reported adoption claimed.
Rather, the person or people who wrote the story fabricated the entire tale as one of hundreds of inspirational tales that depicted celebrities and athletes performing inspiring acts of kindness. They aimed to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts. As we’ll lay out later in this article, the story about Stephen Colbert and his wife adopting a young girl orphaned by the Texas floods amounted to fiction.
An examination of the USA Pulse Today page’s stories found multiple indications of AI-generated images and text.
For example, regarding the picture included in the posts, the Sightengine and Hive Moderation AI-detection websites found a 95% to 99.9% probability that someone “likely” generated the image with AI. Signs of AI visible in the image included anomalies around McGee-Colbert’s neck and shoulder. Colbert also appeared to be missing a finger on his left hand.
(Sightengine/Hive Moderation/Snopes Illustration)
Snopes contacted a manager of the USA Pulse Today Facebook page to ask about the fictional stories displayed on the feed, and will update this story if we receive more information.
These stories all very much resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”
Stephen Colbert is a frequent target of provably false claims. Snopes has previously debunked claims that he secretly adopted twins and that he was teaming up with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (another frequent target of AI claims) for a new TV show.
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