Fact Check: Did Joe and Jill Biden start dating when she was a teenage girl babysitting his children?

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE: A wild claim has been making the rounds that Jill Biden was a teenage babysitter for Joe Biden’s children before they started dating.

The rumor has been gaining traction online, with many on social media insisting that Jill was a teenager looking after Biden’s children when their relationship began. Some posts have even suggested that their age gap meant Biden was already in his 30s while Jill was still in her teens.

One alleged on X (formerly Twitter) that Jill first met Joe "when she was a teenage girl babysitting his children."

“Jill was and still is Joe Biden’s babysitter," another insisted.

“Was that when she was babysitting for Joe’s first wife?” someone else asked.

Some went even further, questioning how Biden ever got elected: "This entire family has issues! I don’t know how he got elected!"

Fact Check: False

The aforementioned claim is completely false.

According to Snopes, Jill Biden was never a teenage babysitter for Joe Biden’s children. The couple first met in 1975, when Jill was in her mid-20s - years after the former president's first wife Neilia Hunter Biden tragically died.

It's worth noting that Jill was born on June 3, 1951, while Biden was born on November 20, 1942 - making them nearly nine years apart in age. Given that Biden was already in his 30s when he became a senator, there is no way Jill could have still been a teenager when they started dating.

According to the White House website, Jill first met Joe in 1975 and they married two years later in 1977. In a 2016 interview with Vogue, Jill confirmed that she was a college senior when they met - which means she was in her mid-20s, not a teenager.

The Delaware Morning News even covered their relationship back in July 1977, revealing that Joe’s brother Frank Biden was the one who introduced them.

Joe and Jill Biden's love story

In a 2013 CNN interview, Jill recalled how Joe got her number and asked her out: “I had met him once before, but we were in a crowd at a fundraiser. So then I guess he saw my picture somewhere and said, ‘Oh, that’s the kind of girl I’d like to date.’ And I knew his brother, so his brother said, ‘Oh, I know her.’ Cause I was in college at the time, and his brother was there."

"So Frank called me, or got my number, and Joe called me. He said, ‘This is Joe Biden. Would you like to go out?’” she recounted.

And just like that, their love story began.

During Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the couple released a video titled “Get to Know Jill Biden”, where they both recalled how they met. Joe explained that his brother Frank Biden was the matchmaker.

“My brother said, ‘There’s this woman. You’ll really like her, Joe.’ So I gave her a call. And she had a date that night," Joe remembered.

“You said, ‘Do you think you could break your date?’” Jill added.

“Oh, that’s right. What did you do?” Joe asked.

“Well, I called and told the guy that I had a friend in from out of town and went out with Joe," she replied.

“I was 30. I was a senator. And I was a widower. Several years earlier, a tractor-trailer broadsided my wife and three children. My wife and daughter were killed. I wasn't big on the whole dating scene. But when I met Jill, I fell in love with her when I saw her," the former president gushed.

The photo that sparked confusion

Some of the viral posts pushing the babysitting rumors include a photograph of Jill Biden, allegedly taken when she was 15 years old. But that is misleading as well.

The image is real, but it wasn’t taken when she was a teenager. Jill Biden herself posted the photo on Instagram and X in August 2020, explaining that it was taken in 1975 after she had already met Joe Biden. At the time, she was in her 20s and not a teenager.

Even The Philadelphia Inquirer published the same image, crediting it to the Biden campaign and dating it to 1976. That would put Jill at 24 years old, while Joe was around 33.

At that point, Joe Biden’s first wife Neilia had already died in a tragic car accident three years earlier. So the timeline of Jill being some kind of teenage babysitter just doesn’t hold up.

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