A sofa-related rumor involving the Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has made the internet explode with sofa jokes.
But as usual – not everything said on the internet is true.
It started as a loose claim on X. Someone claimed that candidate Vance had somehow had sex with a sofa and a latex glove, and that he himself had written about it in his autobiographical book "Hillbilly Elegy" from 2016. It's not true. But that didn't stop the "internet", which thought the claim was too funny to check.
The rumor generated a flood of jokes and images referencing Vance and his relationship to sofas. Someone wrote that "JD Vance makes his wife angry on purpose so he has to sleep on the sofa". Another called Vance the "sofa king" who "sofa surfed" his way to power. A plethora of different memes and image montages with various more or less absurd sofas.
After a week, several American media outlets tried to get to the bottom of the story to curb the rumor spread. The news agency AP, for example, wrote an article under the heading "fact-checking" with the title "No, JD Vance has not had sex with a sofa". An article that led to even more jokes, such as: "Think about getting rejected by a sofa".
AP then took down the article, which, with genuine internet logic, led to new speculations. But according to AP, the article was taken down simply because it had not gone through a correct editorial process before publication.
So far, several thousand posts have been written just on X, with tens of thousands of comments. As The Hollywood Reporter notes: "JD Vance's sofa story will never die".
JD Vance has not commented on the rumor himself so far.
