The Associated Press Just Made A Super Awkward Fact Check About JD Vance And His Couch

The 2024 election has officially gotten weird.

This week, the Associated Press, along with many other media outlets, issued a fairly shocking fact check: No, Republican candidate for Vice President JD Vance did not, in fact, have sex with a couch.

Um, okay then! The fact checks come on the heels of a widely viral rumor that Vance...well, had sex with a couch.

The AP has since deleted its fact check article, but that hasn't stopped the uproar about Vance's enthusiasm for sofas, love seats, divans, davenports—any and all types of cushiony furniture, really. Perhaps even a La-Z-Boy? No judgments.

The rumor began with X user @rickrudescalves, who has since gone private, tweeting about Vance:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to f**king an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

Unfortunately, given how absurdly hilarious it is, that passage does not exist—hence the AP correction. But that did not stop scores of people, most of them supporters of presumptive Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, from believing it.

As the furor over the rumor grew and grew, multiple media outlets did some detective work. The AP searched a PDF of Hillbilly Elegy for words like "couch" and "glove" and found several instances, but none of them pertaining to Vance making sweet, sweet love to either object.

The Cut also did a deep dive of not just the pages cited in the original tweet—which center on Vance's arrival at Ohio State University—but anywhere else in the book.

But that's no reason not to allow a meme this hilarious to flourish, right? So JD Vance as couch paramour has basically taken over social media anyway.

Anyway, JD Vance didn't bone a couch *as far as we know.* But that doesn't mean he didn't for sure!

So we should probably keep this meme going indefinitely until there's proof.