Story about Gov. Tim Walz getting his stomach pumped is fabricated and false

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz alluded to a lewd fake claim about Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance after Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Walz as her 2024 presidential running mate. 

Now, Walz is the target of another crass allegation: that nearly 30 years ago his stomach was pumped after "an unusual overingestion incident."

"Local man’s stomach pumped after ‘neigh’-borhood dare goes wrong," reads what looks like a headline in a newspaper called the West Point Daily News.  

Local man, in this case, is "Tim Walz, a local resident of West Point, Nebraska." The story says he was rushed to West Point General Hospital in August 1995 "after reportedly overingesting horse semen." 

The purported article quotes "Dr. Amanda Thompson, the attending physician at West Point General" and a "close friend who wished to remain anonymous." It also features a photo of Walz when he was younger.

Facebook and Instagram posts sharing the image of the story were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

This is a fabricated story.

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Although there is a West Point News in West Point, Nebraska, we didn’t find a West Point Daily News. 

We also found no West Point General Hospital in West Point, Nebraska, or evidence of a Dr. Amanda Thompson who worked there. Searching on Nebraska’s Health and Human Services Department website for Amanda Thompson’s with medical licenses, we found six entries for medication aides, nurse aides, pharmacist interns and pharmacy technicians, but no doctors.

The timeline also doesn’t track with reality. 

Walz was born in West Point, Nebraska, but moved several times during his childhood, The New York Times reported. He spent some of his childhood in Valentine, Nebraska, and moved to Butte, Nebraska, when he was in high school. After graduating in 1989 from Chadron State College in a Nebraska town with the same name, he spent a year teaching in China before returning to teach high school. 

In 1995, when this story says he lived in West Point, he was actually a resident of Alliance, Nebraska, more than 300 miles away. In 1996, he moved to Mankato, Minnesota. The photo that appears in the purported stomach-pumping story has been used in connection with his time teaching there at Mankato West High School. It appears in an Aug. 6 KSTP-TV news story about "a look back on Tim Walz’s early life in Minnesota," for example. (The high school didn’t immediately respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the photo.)

The stomach-pumping story also shares space in the image with a story by "Bob O’Bobston" about an "international moose count underway." This story appears to have been created with a tool designed to make fake news clippings — the moose article appears in multiple other purported news clippings. Another, for example, featured a fake headline about former President Donald Trump: "Donald Trump states that he doesn’t even know Donald Trump."

We rate claims Walz had his stomach pumped for ingesting horse semen Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. 

CORRECTION, Aug. 13, 2024: The distance between the Nebraska towns of West Point and Alliance is more than 300 miles. An earlier version of this fact-check included the wrong distance.