For the past two weeks, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has been mocked as someone who has sex with couches a strange situation even in the no-holds-barred world of presidential politics.

Now the person who created the bizarre meme is coming clean to Business Insider about how he came up with the weird accusation.

Back on July 15, after Vance was announced as Donald Trumps running mate, a social media user whose handle on X, formerly Twitter, was @rickrudescalves made a bogus post stating that Hillbilly Elegy, Vances bestselling book, mentioned him having sex with a latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.

The claim was completely made up by Rick, which is how Business Insider referred to the jokester to preserve his anonymity.

Although theres no proof that Vance has had any erotic encounters with upholstered furniture, Business Insider reported that Over the past week, for every seven people searching Google for JD Vance, one person has searched JD Vance couch, according to Google Trends.

Enough people believed the joke that both Snopes and The Associated Press issued fact checks on it. (The APs story was later taken down, with a spokesperson telling Semafor reporter Max Tani that it didnt go through the wire services standard editing process.)

Rick, who has since abandoned the @rickrudescalves handle on X, told Business Insider that he had a similar upbringing to Vance, but took a different path politically.

Rick thinks the meme has stuck to Vance because the Ohio senator gives off a couch-fucker vibe.

I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this, Rick told Business Insider. I think by the time the AP thing came out, I was talking to one of my sisters and saying, Oh, yeah, Trump is already calling him a couch-fucker.

But with the memes success, Risk also voiced concern about the gullibility of the electorate, though he couched it in somewhat softer language.

In terms of media literacy, and those kinds of things, I guess I was already in the mud rolling around, he said, noting that he hadnt intended to spread misinformation.

Read more at Business Insider .