Photos shared in August 2024 show US Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance authentically in a dress and a blonde wig.
On August 11, 2024, X-user and podcaster Matt Bernstein posted a photo allegedly showing U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance once wearing a dress and a blonde wig.
Bernstein captioned the image, which has been viewed more than 17.6 million times at the time of writing, with the words: “New: I got a photo of JD Vance in a women’s suit from his law school at Yale.”
Almost 24 hours later, Bernstein posted another photo with the caption: “A the second photo landed in my inbox.”
He also shared both photos on his verified Instagram account.
(X-User @mattxiv)
Snopes has spoken to numerous sources, all of whom have confirmed the authenticity of the images—that is, they were not digitally manipulated, were not created using AI, and actually depict JD Vance—which is why we have rated this claim as “true.”
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A member of Yale Law School’s 2013 graduating class – Vance’s class – also confirmed to Snopes in a phone call on condition of anonymity that “fellow students have confirmed that the two images posted are authentic.”
Likewise, another fellow student at Yale, Travis Whitfield, claimed to have originally published the first photo.
(X-User @twhitfill)
“It comes from a group chat of Vance’s classmates and is from a friend of a friend,” Whitfill told the American news website The Daily Beast“I think it was stolen from Facebook and taken at a Halloween party.”
Whitfill also pointed to a website called “jdvanceindrag.com” (archived), which directed visitors to The Trevor Project – a non-profit organization dedicated to “Suicide prevention measures for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer and doubting young people” – as well as a donation platform ActBlue and non-profit organizations Vote further And Vote.org.
