The Associated Press has taken down a “fact-check” story with the headline “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” “The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” the outlet wrote in a statement to Mediaite. The Vance-couch rumor started on July 15 when X user @rickrudescalves posted: “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to f*cking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” The post went viral and was seen more than 1.8 million times before the poster went private. Its virality was apparently enough to warrant an Associated Press fact-check, which involved a keyword search in the book for the words “sofa,” “couch,” “couches” and “glove.” “Sofa” and “glove” did not appear, and no references to “couch” or “couches” implied sex with the furniture.
