Fact Check: Is the Viral Phone Call Between Swati Maliwal and Dhruv Rathee Authentic?

People are sharing a fake phone call between AAP Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal and YouTuber Dhruv Rathee as if it were a real chat between the two.

In the video that went viral, Ms. Maliwal can be heard telling Mr. Rathee that she was raped in front of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his wife Sunita Kejriwal. She also asks Mr. Rathee not to make a video about it. After that, they talked about whether Mr. Rathee’s “payments” were on time.

BOOM talked to two different AI detection tools, Itisaar and Contrails. Both told us that the audio that is going viral was made by AI and is not a real chat between Swati Maliwal and Dhruv Rathee.

In a report to the Delhi Police on May 13, Swati Maliwal said that she had been attacked by Bibhav Kumar, who works for Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, inside the Chief Minister’s home. Mr. Kumar has rejected the claim and written to the Delhi Police to ask them to file a FIR on his behalf. Kumar was caught by the Delhi police on May 18, 2024, and is still in their custody. After this, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee made a video about it and said that Swati Maliwal’s report was not true. In this background, the audio tape that is going viral is being shared.

Someone on X shared the AI-made sound file with the Hindi description, which means “Delhi” in English. A video of Swati Maliwal and Dhruv Rathi gets a lot of views. Dhruv Rathee was told not to make the video by Swati Maliwal. The beating took place because Arvind and Sunita Kejriwal told them to. Dhruv Rathee makes films about what the opposition wants to do.

Fact Check 

When BOOM carefully listened to the audio, they noticed a few mistakes that made them think it might be fake. At 0:09, Ms. Maliwal’s voice can be heard saying that she was hit in front of both Arvind and Sunita Kejriwal. There is a cut to another part of the video where her voices are mixed together.

This is what led us to run the audio clip through Itisaar, a deepfake detecting tool made by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur. It was very likely that the audio was a deepfake based on the data of the tool.

The audio clip was also sent to Contrails’ deepfake researchers, who confirmed that the famous phone call is a “AI audio spoof” and said, “Both speakers have clear patterns of AI voice cloning.”