FACT CHECK: Viral Image Makes False Claim About Joe And Jill Biden’s Relationship
An image shared on Facebook claims President Joe Biden started a physical relationship with First Lady Jill Biden while she was his “teenage baby sitter” and his first wife was hospitalized.
Verdict: False
Jill Biden was in her 20s when they started dating, according to media reports and the couple’s account of their relationship. There is no indication they met when Jill Biden was a teenager.
Fact Check:
The meme includes an old photo of Joe and Jill Biden that the first lady tweeted on Aug. 18, 2020. Text inside the meme reads in part, “‘Dr. Jill’ was the Biden’s teenage baby sitter when Pedo Joe began having sex with her while his wife was in the hospital.”
Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi died in December 1972 in a car crash that also injured their two sons, NBC News reported. State police said Neilia and Naomi Biden were pronounced dead at the hospital after the crash, according to a Delaware County Daily Times article archived on Newspapers.com.
Joe Biden and Jill Biden started dating in 1975, according to The New York Times and the White House website. She and her first husband, Bill Stevenson, finalized their divorce during the same year. Jill Biden, who was born in 1951, and Joe Biden, who was born in 1942, were respectively in their 20s and 30s when they started dating.
In 2016, Jill Biden told Vogue that the pair’s first date took place during her senior year of college, which, according to the University of Delaware website, was in 1975. She also said in a 2012 CNN interview with Piers Morgan that she had met Joe Biden once before the date while at a fundraiser. They married in 1977.
Stevenson, her first husband, has claimed that he had introduced Jill Biden to Joe Biden in 1972 and that her relationship with Joe Biden started in 1974. Jill Biden’s spokesperson denied his allegations in a statement to Inside Edition. (RELATED: Did Jill Biden Say, ‘All Americans Will Be Required To Learn Spanish When We Win’?)
“The relationship of Joe and Jill Biden is well documented,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Inside Edition in September 2020. “Jill Biden separated from her first husband irreconcilably in the fall of 1974 and moved out of their marital home. Joe and Jill Biden had their first date in March of 1975, and they married in June of 1977.”
There is no indication that Jill and Joe Biden met when she was a teenager. We rate this claim false.