2020 Slideshows for Candidates
Reuters Staff
Social media users share reports claiming that First Lady Jill Biden was President Joe Biden’s teen caretaker and Joe started sleeping with her while his wife was in the hospital. This assertion is untrue: according to the Bidens, Jill and Joe Biden’s first date was in March 1975 when Jill was in her twenties.
According to the posts, Joe Biden started dating Jill when she was a ‘teen babysitter’, claiming she was under the age of consent at the time. The derogatory posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here. The posts were marked as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation.
Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia Hunter, whom he married in 1966, died in a car accident in 1972, along with their 13-month-old daughter Naomi, and Joe has his two young sons, Beau and Hunter (here), care for. . Neilia died the day of the accident. More about this can be found (here, here, here).
Joe Biden and Jill started dating in March 1975 according to the White House website (here), various news outlets (here, here) and social media posts by Jill Biden himself (here, here ), which also includes the photo shared in the social media posts.
The caption posted on Jill’s social media with the photo of her with a young Joe (here, here ) further supports this timeline. It says, “” How did you get this number? “Those were the first words I spoke to Joe when he called me out of the blue on a Saturday in 1975.”
Jill said in an interview with Vogue that she was a senior university when she met Joe (here) and her graduation is listed as 1975 on the University of Delaware website (here). Jill was born on June 3, 1951 (here) and Joe on November 20, 1942 (here). That means Jill would have been 23 years old when she met Joe, not a teenager, and Joe would have been 32 years old (according to their reports, they met in March 1975).
In an interview with CNN in 2012, Jill said she only met Joe in public before Joe saw her photo in an ad for a local park in Wilmington, Delaware, got her number from his brother Frank and called her to ask her out. . ‘I’ve met him once before, but we were in a crowd and it was at a fundraiser. Then I thought he saw my picture somewhere and he said, ‘This is the kind of girl I want to date.’ And I knew his brother, and his brother said, ‘Oh, I know her.’ Because I was in college at the time and his brother was there. Frank got my number and Joe called and said, “This is Joe Biden, do you want to go out?” […] I had another appointment that night that I canceled. ”(Here)
Biden also said his brother set him up on a blind date with Jill during an introductory video of Jill Biden airing on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in 2020, as seen here.
Jill was married to her first husband, Bill Stevenson, from 1970 to 1975. Tabloids (here, here) reported on the allegations Stevenson made that Jill and Joe met while Stevenson was still married to Jill. Jill Biden has denied these allegations to Inside Edition here. Regardless of the truthfulness of these claims, Jill would not have met Joe Biden when she was a minor, as the posts claim.
VERDICT
Untrue. According to Jill and Joe Biden, they met on a blind date, set up by Biden’s brother, in 1975. There is no evidence that the two met when Jill was a teenager.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.