The Associated Press removes a fact-check claiming J.D. Vance has not had sex with a couch

The fact-check references a few joke social media posts that have been circulating that claim the Republican vice presidential nominee wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy about having sex with a couch.

One tweet reads, “In his dreadful novel, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ JD Vance described having sex with a rubber glove secured between cushions on his couch. Republicans chose him to be one heartbeat away from becoming POTUS. Voters in NC, the U.S. furniture capital, should be particularly horrified.” (Fact-check: Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir, not a novel.)

Another post: “Can’t say for sure but he might be the first VP pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

To be clear, Vance did not write in Hillbilly Elegy about having sexual relations with living room furniture, and a Snopes debunk remains live about the viral joke. The archived version of AP’s fact-check also notes that there’s no such passage in the PDF of the book. But there’s also technically no proof that Vance didn’t have sex with a couch — there’s no way a journalist could truly know that. He just didn’t write about it.

“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,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.

News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable. A headline like, “No, JD Vance didn’t write about fucking a couch” perhaps would have been more accurate.

And when you really peel back the layers (turn over the cushions?), there’s really no way for any of us to prove we didn’t have sex with a couch.

Correction, July 25: The article was removed as of Thursday morning, not Friday morning.