Did Tom Hanks broadcast a program in 2026 about Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse and trafficking of Virginia Giuffre titled "Finding The Light?" No, that's not true: There has been no broadcast schedule and no real news report that such a show aired and attracted an audience of millions. There is no public record of Hanks or anyone else promoting a program by that title on social media or elsewhere. The multiple social media posts about the non-existent show arose from a network of social media accounts and websites run from Vietnam.
The story appeared in a Jan. 7, 2026 Facebook post (archived here) on the "The News 247" page. It started "Producer Tom Hanks -- known as "America's Dad" -- caused an unprecedented explosion on television when he publicly revealed the entire hidden causes behind a case that underground forces had been trying to bury for 10 years, in a program titled "Finding the Light," first broadcast in 2026.". It continued:
The moment the first episode aired, millions of viewers were left in stunned silence. No dramatic music, no flowery narration -- only sealed files, testimonies that had once been ignored, and timelines showing how the truth had been suffocated over the course of a decade. The program gradually revealed how a lone woman, Virginia Giuffre, was pushed to the margins of public attention while powerful names remained behind a wall of silence.Every detail presented raised a chilling question: Who ordered the cover-up? Who benefited from this forced forgetting? And more importantly -- if not now, then when would justice be allowed to appear on national television?"Finding the Light" is not just a program. It is a declaration that some truths, no matter how long they are buried, will always find their way back into the light.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/profile.php?id=61581861062551.)
The "The News 247" page promoting the story had a page transparency tab (archived here) indicating it was run from Vietnam:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of the page transparency tab of "The News 247" page on Facebook.)
The Vietnam connection is significant, since fact-checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories coming from a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country here.
Lead Stories searched the Google News index of thousands of news sites for any real news reports mentioning "Tom Hanks", "Finding The Light" and "Giuffre". That search, archived here, found only a Gannet Newspapers debunk of the posts claiming the film exists.
The Facebook post linked to a story (archived here) on a "triforce247.com" web page where English was at one point replaced with Vietnamese. Here is the passage:
There were no swelling orchestral scores, no dramatic reenactments, no cinematic tricks designed to manipulate emotion. Instead, Finding the Light opened with something far more unsettling: silence. Silence broken only by the rustle of sealed documents being opened on camera, by the steady voices of witnesses whose testimonies had once been dismissed, and by timelines projected across the screen showing -- with surgical precision -- how truth had been slowly suffocated for ten long years.
Millions of viewers sat frozen in their homes.
Lead Stories submitted the fragment of Vietnamese to Google Translate, which reports it said "It could be an image of one or more people, a suit, a TV, a newsroom, and text."
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Google Translate result for Vietnamese text found in
A manual search of Tom Hanks' Facebook account did not surface any references, by Hanks, to a "Finding The Light" program, nor to Giuffre. On Jan. 16, 2026, had posted nothing since November of 2025:
A search on Facebook for the phrase "Tom Hanks, Finding The Light" (archived here) brought up dozens of results with almost exactly the same story but a variety of images and layouts and pointing readers to made for advertising web pages with requests for their personal information. Below is a GIF that scrolls through the various versions of the posts about the fake movie:
(Image source: animation of Facebook search results for the phrase "Tom Hanks Finding The Light".)
Here is what the personal information-seeking form looks like at the bottom of the story on the Triforce247 web page:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of form found at https://triforce247.com/c1-a-decade-of-darkness-ends-on-live-television-tom-hanks.)
Lead Stories has published a primer -- or a prebunk -- on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam'"
