J.D. Vance Promoted Rumors of Pet-Eating Immigrants Even After Learning They Were 'Baseless'

To justify his misinformation, the Republican vice presidential candidate cited a report from a woman whose lost cat turned up, very much alive, in her own basement.

"Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country," Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), Donald Trump's running mate, averred on X the morning of September 9, referring to rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating stolen cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. That same morning, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck told The Wall Street Journal, a Vance staffer called to ask him, "Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?"

Heck's response was unequivocal: "I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless."

Heck's rebuttal did not stop Vance from re-upping those claims the very next day. "My office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who've said their neighbors' pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants," he wrote on the morning of September 10. Perhaps based on his staffer's belated attempt at fact checking, Vance acknowledged that "it's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false." Still, he said, that possibility should not dissuade his "fellow patriots" from spreading those rumors: "Keep the cat memes flowing."

Trump did that in a big way during his ABC debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that night. "In Springfield," he complained, "they're eating the dogs, the people that came in; they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."

Moderator David Muir jumped in to note that ABC News, like Vance's staffer, had consulted with Heck, who "told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community." Like Vance, Trump was unfazed. "Maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager," he replied, "but the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people who went there."

In a CNN interview last Sunday, Vance was still doubting the denials from sources such as Heck; Springfield's police department; Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who condemned the pet-eating migrant story as "a piece of garbage that was simply not true"; and Springfield's Republican mayor, Rob Rue. "We have told those at the national level that they are speaking these things that are untrue," Rue told the Journal, but those claims have been "repeated and doubled down on."

To justify Vance's continued promotion of what he himself had described as "rumors" that might not be true, the candidate's staff on Tuesday gave the Journal "a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors." But "when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore's house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement." Kilgore, who was "wearing a Trump shirt and hat," said "she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app."

The "cat-eating rumors," the Journal notes, "started with a post by a Springfield woman on a private Facebook page." That account "turned out to be third-hand" and was "subsequently disavowed by the original poster, according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation."

This is the sort of evidence that Vance apparently had in mind when he told CNN's Dana Bash that his information about pet-eating immigrants "comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents." But Vance made it clear that he thought it did not really matter whether these stories were true.

"I've been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months," he told Bash. "The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."