Did Donald Trump's pick for vice president, Sen. JD Vance, write about a drunken party with embarrassingly graphic details on page 21 of his book "Hillbilly Elegy"? No, that's not true: The person who made the post on social media later clarified it was not real. Additional searches in the hard copy and digital copies of the book found no passage resembling the one in the claim.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X by @HumanistReport on July 25, 2024. The post featured what appeared to be an image of a passage from a hard copy of the book. The caption read:
Decided to dig into Hillbilly Elegy. 21 pages in and I found this insane fucking admission. 💀
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
=
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Jul 26 14:35:59 2024 UTC)
The text in the image read:
gon' tell 'em I said it,' I remarked.
Life in Jackson ain't quite like it is elsewhere. Just because we were poor didn't mean we didn't know how to throw a party and have a gosh darn 'ol good time. Lindsey and I threw a big party with the fellas from the gas station one night. We filled up a bucket with fruit punch and vodka, blasted '80s rock, and got high as kites. That's the first time I experimented with shrooms. Lindsey woke up with a penis drawn on her face and I found an empty M&M's Minis container shoved halfway up my ass. Don't quite know how it got there to be honest, but it wasn't as pleasant as the hotdogs we'd use for makeshift dildos in college. Still, that was one hell of a night!Mee-Maw and Pee-Paw would never let a thing like that happen. Momma wouldn't pay no mind to our shenanigans so long as she got her fixin' of some
This post is fake. A follow-up post (archived here) by @HumanistReport about 50 minutes after posting the above image, clarified:
This is 100% not a real passage from his book btw just fyi. 😂
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Jul 26 15:25:11 2024 UTC)
To fully verify that this passage does not appear in Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," Lead Stories checked what appears on page 21 in a hard copy of the book. The page numbered 20 appears to the left and page 21 appears to the right of the book gutter. By contrast, the image of the fake passage, purportedly page 21, shows a left-side page.
Neither page 20 or 21 of the real book (pictured below) contains the fake post's passage about a big party.
(Source: Lead Stories photos of page 20 and 21 of the book "Hillbilly Elegy" taken on Fri Jul 26 15:49:17 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories used the search function at archive.org to search the contents of "Hillbilly Elegy," which currently is not available to borrow from the Internet Archive Books collection. There were no results (pictured below) in the keyword searches for "vodka" or "shrooms."
(Source: archive.org screenshots taken on Fri Jul 26 14:35:59 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories downloaded a digital copy of the book through Apple Books (archived here). Keyword searches (pictured below) for "Vodka" and "Shrooms" also produced no results.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image of digital book search screenshots taken on Fri Jul 26 15:01:06 2024 UTC)
Despite the disclaimer posted within an hour of the post with the fake passage, many people have shared the original post (archived here) with comments suggesting they believe it is true.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims about JD Vance can be found here. Other Lead Stories debunks of claims about the 2024 presidential elections can be read here.
