What archived social media posts or Wayback Machine captures exist showing Erika Kirk with Tyler Massey or Cabot Phillips?
Executive summary
Public reporting shows multiple resurfaced photos and social-media posts linking Erika Kirk to Tyler “JT” Massey (photos from 2014–2015) and to Cabot Phillips (posts and interactions from 2017), and several news outlets archived those reports; however, the raw original social posts are not included in the provided sources and claims that Twitter/X posts were removed and captured by the Wayback Machine are reported but not demonstrated in the materials given [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Photos from 2014–2015 tying Erika Kirk to Tyler “JT” Massey: what reporting documents
Multiple outlets cite a set of photographs of Erika with a man identified as Tyler “JT” Massey that circulated online and went viral in December 2025, with several stories pointing to a 2015 couples photoshoot and at least one image said to be from Phoenix Fashion Week; The List and Parade reported the existence of those images and quoted a 2014 Arizona Foothills Magazine piece in which Erika wrote about “JT Massey” as her boyfriend — material that reporters treated as direct evidence of a relationship prior to her meeting Charlie Kirk [3] [1] [5]. Several pieces note that the photos were shared widely across X/Twitter and other platforms and that Luna Bear Studios, an Arizona photographer, was identified by some sleuths as the original poster of at least some of the images [2] [6].
2. Social posts and captions linking Erika Kirk to Cabot Phillips in 2017
Reporting points to social-media interactions and images from 2017 that linked Erika and Cabot Phillips, including a widely-cited photo from September 2017 in which Phillips allegedly captioned a picture, “Yes, that couple who gets painting lessons together,” and X/Twitter interactions between June and October 2017 that some users archived or screenshot and later posted as “receipts” [7] [3] [8]. Media coverage characterizes that corpus as spanning “multiple social media posts from 2017” and notes user-circulated screenshots and replies that remained after original accounts were locked or scrubbed [7] [3].
3. Archival evidence cited by outlets — what exists in the supplied reporting
One of the provided items is an archive.ph capture of a Hindustan Times article that chronicles the resurfacing of these images and mentions the Luna Bear Studios photoshoot and the 2015 dates; that archive.preserves a news article about the material but not the original social-media posts themselves [2]. Several outlets explicitly report that key social posts were deleted or that accounts were locked and that what persists in public view are screenshots, reposts, and news stories summarizing the material rather than direct, still-live links to the original tweets or Instagram posts [4] [3].
4. Wayback Machine claims and the limits of what the sources show
Some reporting — notably Inquisitr — states that the Wayback Machine captured evidence of deleted Twitter/X posts and that users “scrubbed” profiles (a claim repeated across aggregators), but none of the supplied sources provide a direct Wayback Machine URL or a screenshot of a Wayback capture of those original posts within the materials provided here; the reporting therefore asserts that the Wayback captured deleted material but does not itself supply the archived Wayback links for independent verification in these sources [4] [2]. That gap matters: available citations in this dataset document archived news coverage and many reposted images or screenshots, but not the primary archived social posts as live Wayback URLs.
5. Competing explanations and unresolved questions
News pieces and social commentators offer alternative readings of the images — for example, some users argued the 2015 photos could be modeling or a staged photoshoot rather than engagement pictures, and outlets note that engagement claims have not been independently confirmed; similarly, while reporters document 2017 interactions between Erika and Cabot, the underlying deleted-or-locked posts are largely represented now by screenshots and third‑party reposts rather than the original live pages [2] [3] [6]. Given those limits in the provided reporting, the safest summary is that contemporaneous photos and social interactions connecting Erika Kirk to Tyler Massey (2014–2015) and Cabot Phillips have been widely reported and archived as news articles and screenshots, an archive.ph copy of a Hindustan Times story exists in the record here, and claims that the Wayback Machine holds direct captures of scrubbed Twitter/X posts are reported but not shown in these source documents [2] [1] [3] [4].