It was a Black model’s stunning US Open moment— a picture of class and style that simply highlighted her time at the 2024 event. Instead, her photo is at the center of a social media firestorm after a white influencer allegedly stole that same picture to use as her own in an embarrassing Photoshop fail.
Suggested Reading
The snapshot in question originally belongs to Tatiana Elizabeth, a Black woman, who attended the 2024 US Open in New York, wearing a green and white tennis-inspired outfit. Two years later, that same photo popped up on a white influencer’s Instagram page, named Lauren Blake Boultier, but with her face edited on Elizabeth’s body.
Elizabeth called out Boultier for swiping her photo and keeping everything in the picture the exact same, including the Louis Vuitton purse, the same pose and identical spectators and stadium details in the background.
The most telling clue is that Boultier has the same tattoo and placement on her right wrist as Elizabeth does in her original photo.
Boultier, who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, also tagged her fake photo’s location as the Miami Open, even though the tennis court in the picture is the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens. Black tennis superstar Coco Gauff commented, “this court is not even in Miami…,” the U.S. Sun reported.
“Bar for bar,” Elizabeth said on TikTok. “By no means am I trying to bash this girl. Mental health is real, and I’m not a bully. I’m just a little perplexed. I just want to know the reason. Has social media gotten into our heads so much that we are disregarding couth?”
Elizabeth’s followers were just as confused.
“This is soooo weird,” one TikToker wrote.
A second added, “This is actually scary and shouldn’t be taken lightly.” A third person questioned, “do ppl do this and really think they’re the only person to see the og photo??”
Elizabeth said she has not heard from Boultier—much less an apology— despite commenting on her now-deleted post. “She has not given an explanation, and she is probably embarrassed, but I think that the nice and accountable thing to do would be to reach out and at least apologize to the person whose photo you took,” Elizabeth said.
However, the suspected picture-hijacker did address the incident to TMZ Sports.
Instead of taking accountability, she blamed her team and— wait for it— AI for stealing a Black woman’s picture. “This came from an A.I. content system my team uses to generate images at scale. I did not see the original image or intentionally set out to copy anyone’s work, but that doesn’t change the outcome,” she said.
Boultier said she understands her “actions” have “impacted another creator, especially when it comes to respecting original work, and I never want to contribute to that kind of frustration or harm within the creative community that I have been a part of for 10 years.”
Boultier has disabled comments on her Instagram and TikTok pages, but that hasn’t stopped her from posting.
A community note on her latest photo dump posted Tuesday reads, in part: “This user has been exposed for using AI to put her face on other women’s bodies to portray they are traveling. This user is also spoofing their geotags on their post for fake content to satisfy their need for social media validation and engagement.”
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.