Extremely Convincing "Pee Tape" Circulating Web Appears To Be Fake

For many of the politically engaged and terminally online members of the populace, there has been one object, one mythical piece of media that has become something like their white whale. That object is the Pee Tape, a piece of footage which allegedly shows President Donald Trump directing two Russian sex workers to urinate on a bed at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow because the Obamas once slept there. The tape has never been unearthed, but rumors about its contents have given dreamers a fair idea of what it looks like.

The allegations came as part of the explosive Steele dossier, which alleged that the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russian leaders to help swing the election in its favor. While hubbub about Russiagate have died down as other Trump scandals have caught national attention, many held out hope that the Pee Tape, by far the most salacious part of the dossier, was real. One such person was Ashley Feinberg, a former Gawker journalist and current Slate writer who has been one of the most dogged journalists on the hunt for the tape.

On Wednesday, Feinberg published an exhaustive analysis of what could very well be the pee tape that has been circulating online since January. The tape (which won't be linked to here, but is linked to in the Slate piece), is a phone recording a silent scene in which a man who certainly looks like Trump watching two naked women on a bed. At one point, one of the women appears to urinate.

Feinberg tracked the existence of this video to January 15th, 2019, when it appeared on 4chan and Twitter. While Feinberg believes it is fake, she admits it could be a very convincing fake. Details in the video appear to line up with what we know about Trump on the day of the alleged Golden Shower show. For example, the "Trump" in the tape is wearing cufflinks consistent to what Trump was wearing that day.

Furthermore, the tape looks like it appears in the actual room Trump would have stayed in at the hotel. Feinberg looked at old Colbert footage from inside the alleged hotel room and interviewed special effects experts and concluded that someone either spent the exorbitant sum to stay in the room and film the fake or go through the enormous trouble of creating a replica of the room to create the fake. However, Feinberg does discover that the room as it looks now is what is used in the "Pee Tape," which disproves the legitimacy of the video. The events of the Pee Tape were supposed to take place in 2013, and the room was renovated in 2015.

So while the "pee tape" appears to be fake, it appears to be a very good fake, leaving Feinberg wondering why it was even created. She concludes:

Someone made this video and most likely recorded it in a hotel room that costs about $18,000 a night. Was it all for the sake of feeding rumors, or for confusing everyone, or for tricking some overconfident journalist into the ultimate feat of Fake News? The only thing we can say definitively is that based on the room in which it appears to have been filmed, this can’t possibly be the real thing. Probably.