No, Biden didn’t say he met Jill Biden when she was 12

Misinformation about how President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden became acquainted has long been social media fodder. But a recent remark by the president is putting a new spin on the rumors. 

"She was 12, I was 30," read a quote that appeared in an Instagram post that showed an old image of Jill Biden sitting on Joe Biden’s lap. 

The Oct. 2 post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The photo has been misused before. In 2021, it was shared with the description that "she was 15" and "he was in his 30s when she used to be the family babysitter." 

Joe Biden, who was born in November 1942, is nearly 10 years older than Jill Biden, who was born in June 1951. According to the White House website and news reports, they met in 1975 and went on their first date that March, when she would have been 23 years old. She wasn’t the family babysitter. 

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stated on October 23, 2024 in a Threads post

Kamala Harris’ statements about Trump invoking Adolf Hitler were based on a “debunked hoax from The Atlantic.”

On Sept. 23, Joe Biden was giving a speech at a Democratic National Committee event in Washington, D.C., when he appeared to recognize someone in the audience and pointed at the person. 

"You got to say ‘hi’ to me. We go back a long way," he said. "She was 12, and I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done." 

Some social media posts wrongly claimed that this amounted to Biden admitting he had an inappropriate relationship with a minor. That’s wrong, and so is the claim that he said his wife was 12 when he was 30. 

We rate this post False.