Social media users are sharing posts which claim that First Lady Jill Biden was President Joe Biden’s teenage babysitter and Joe started a relationship with her while his wife was in the hospital. This claim is false: according to the Bidens, Jill and Joe Biden’s first date was in March 1975 when Jill was in her twenties.
The posts claim Joe Biden began dating Jill when she was their “teenage baby sitter”, 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 flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation.
Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia Hunter, whom he married in 1966, was killed in a car crash in 1972, along with their 13-month-old daughter Naomi, leaving Joe to care for his two young sons, Beau and Hunter ( here ). Neilia died the day of the crash. More on 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 herself ( here , here ), which also include the photo being shared in the social media posts.
The caption on Jill’s social media posts 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 told Vogue in an interview that she was a senior in college when she met Joe ( here ) and her graduation date is listed as 1975 on the University of Delaware website ( here ). Jill was born on June 3, 1951 ( here ) and Joe on Nov. 20, 1942 ( here ). This means that Jill would have been 23 years-old when she met Joe, not a teenager, and Joe would have been 32 years old (according their accounts, they met in March of 1975).
In an interview with CNN in 2012, Jill said that she had only met Joe once in public before Joe saw her photo in an advertisement for a local park in Wilmington, Delaware, got her number from his brother Frank and called her to ask her out. “I had met him once before but we were in a crowd and it was at a fundraiser. So then I guess he saw my picture somewhere and he said, ‘That’s the kind of girl I’d like to date.’ And I knew his brother so his brother said, ‘Oh I know her.’ Because I was in college at the time and his brother was there. So Frank got my number and Joe called and said, ‘This is Joe Biden, would you like to go out?’ […] I actually had another date that night that I cancelled.” ( here )
Biden also has said that his brother set him up on a blind-date with Jill, during an introduction video to Jill Biden broadcast on the second day of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, as seen here .
Jill was married to her first husband, Bill Stevenson, from 1970 to 1975. Tabloids ( here , here ) have reported on allegations made by Stevenson that Jill and Joe had met while Stevenson was still married to Jill. Jill Biden denied these allegations to Inside Edition, here . Regardless of these claims’ veracity, Jill would still not have met Joe Biden when she was underage , as the posts claim.