JD Vance couch memes receive an official fact check

JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, isn’t really getting the most ideal news at the moment, as the Associated Press (AP) has had to point out that the Ohio senator did not, in fact, write in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy about carrying out a sexual act involving a couch and a latex glove.

Vance was announced as the other name on the Republican presidential nominee’s ticket on 15 July, and on that same day one Twitter user claimed pages 179 to 181 of the aforementioned book contains an anecdote about “f***ing an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions”.

Except, that’s not true at all.

While the book does mention the piece of furniture on nine separate pages, not one of these details Vance getting intimate with a sofa – indeed, the Twitter user believed to have first spread the baseless claim followed up his tweet with a picture of the ‘go on the internet and tell lies’ meme from the animated series Arthur.

Meme directory KnowYourMeme and the fact-checking website Snopes have both debunked the claim, but now it seems to have become so prolific on social media that the AP has waded in with an official fact check.

An archived version of the article shows an earlier headline was simply, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch”, but it has now been changed to “Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch”.

The piece, penned by Melissa Goldin, reads: “Vance does not write about performing such an act in his bestselling book. A searchable PDF of the memoir includes 10 mentions of the word ‘couch’ or ‘couches,’ none of which are related to accounts of salacious escapades.

“Some social media users have claimed the story appears on pages 179 to 181, where Vance actually writes about his first days as a freshman at The Ohio State University.”

Goldin also notes that the word “glove” doesn’t feature in the book at any point.

And Twitter/X can’t quite believe that what started out as a “s***post” has escalated to the level that the AP has had to step in:

The bizarre claim is the latest from the US political scene to be rubbished, following baseless rumours that US president Joe Biden is currently in a hospice (he isn’t).

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