The arrest of White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting suspect Cole Allen has sparked any number of wild claims online concerning the 31-year-old. One focuses on a video from 2017 featuring Allen alongside someone bearing a resemblance to Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance.
A resurfaced video that originally aired on ABC7 Los Angeles (KABC) in 2017 features Allen, then a student at the California Institute of Technology, presenting an invention at the "Aging into the Future" conference, a technology expo focused on aging, elder care, and innovations that help older adults live better lives.
The segment features Allen discussing a prototype emergency brake for wheelchairs. "The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels, but don't lock the chair to the ground. But with this device, that will prevent the chair from skidding at all," he tells reporter Lori Corbin in the video.
While the appearance of Allen in the segment is a talking point in itself, many viewers also pointed to the presence of a woman bearing more than a passing resemblance to Usha Vance in the video.
It's an observation that has sparked some wild theories.
The Aging into the Future Conference featured in the video was held in LA in March 2017. Vance was clerking for the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in the same period, more than 2,500 miles away. She was also heavily pregnant with her son Ewan Blaine Vance, who was born in June of that year.
This is common knowledge because Vance would go on to make headlines after it was revealed that she returned to work just seven weeks after his birth. The woman who appears in the video is presenting for SmallCircle, an LA-based aging‑tech and caregiving‑focused initiative that emerged from the non-profit senior‑services ecosystem, that closely associated with St. Barnabas Senior Services (SBSS). Newsweek has contacted Florence Chung, the creator of the conference, for further information on the identity of the woman featured in the video.
Though the woman in the clip does look like Vance, the geographical distance and timing of the event makes her attendance a near-impossibility. The woman in the video does not appear to be pregnant and there is no indication online of any link between Vance and SmallCircle.
Any similarities are therefore entirely coincidental. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment on the claims.
This claim comes hot on the heels of speculation online suggesting that, in the chaotic aftermath of White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting incident, JD Vance was escorted out by Secret Service agents before President Donald Trump. In that instance, however, there could be more truth to the claims.