‘Couch-F**ker’ Joker Who Launched Fact Checks Speaks Out — Taunts ‘Idiots’ On Team Trump Forced To ‘Grapple With This’

The man who launched bonkers fact-checks with a deadpan joke about Trump VP pick Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) sexually violating a couch has spoken out in his first interview, taunting former President Donald Trump and his team as “idiots” forced to deal with his mischief.

Couch-mania took over resistance Twitter last week after a claim that Vance’s book contained a decidedly not-comfy revelation went viral:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

That post was from the since-deleted account of an X/Twitter user named @rickrudescalves. There is no such passage in Vance’s book.

His tweet sparked a surreal fact-check from The Associated Press that has since been deleted, and another by Snopes that you can still read.

The jokester — known simply as “Rick” — spoke out in an interview with Business Insider’s Katherine Long and revealed the thinking behind the prank:

“I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this,” Rick said. “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.'”

…

Perhaps, Rick said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the “ecstatic truth” — in Herzog’s words, “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual,” encompassing falsehoods that “make some essence of the man visible.”

As for his decision to include a fake citation in a tweet about a man having sex with a couch, Rick claims highbrow inspiration. “Not to egghead it up,” he said, but he was an English major “and I do have certain literary tastes.” Listing page numbers was “in the vein of” authors Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who used excerpts and citations, real and invented, to lend an air of authenticity to their fiction. “It’s something I’ve found funny my entire life,” he said.

Read the full interview here.

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