Nate Bargatze Did Not Marry His Wife When She Was 17, Stop It

Nate Bargatze has been catching heat for attending the White House UFC fight over the weekend, a move that has not done wonders for the rumors that he’s secretly MAGA. Once again, you can’t claim that you’re “not political” while attending a wildly political event. Although, in a purely opportunistic sense, it was a chance for Bargatze to be one of the more famous guests in attendance after Dana White tried and failed to lock down the following celebs: The Rock, Guy Ritchie, Tom Brady, Jason Statham, Adam Sandler, Mario Lopez, and… Jared Leto? OK.

Anyway, while Bargatze has been rightly getting called out over the Freedom 250 event, that unfortunately opened the door for something our side of the aisle loves to dabble in: Making sh*t up. Directly on the heels of the controversy, rumors started spreading on Reddit that Bargatze married his wife, Laura, when he was 27 and she was 17. I get that something like this might seem legal in Tennessee, but let me be clear: This is not true.

Because the internet has been dumbening itself and society at such an alarming rate that UFC fights are happening on the White House lawn by direct order of the president, the Nate Bargatze child bride rumor has already started polluting AI search results. While looking into this story, I was served responses that both confirmed and denied the online gossip, and it’s been a crap shoot which one I’ll get. However, by using my human brain, it was easy to debunk this whole thing.

Here’s the official story on the couple via PEOPLE:

Though Nate has been a comedian for over 20 years, his relationship with Laura had more humble beginnings: The two met in their early 20s while working together at an Applebee’s restaurant in Tennessee. Nate was a host, while Laura was a server — roles he would later joke about in The Greatest Average American.

“Someone asked [Laura] recently … did you ever imagine when you started dating that your lives would become all that it’s become?” he recalled in the stand-up special.

Nate continued, “She said, ‘When I met him, he was a host and I didn’t think he was smart enough to be a server. So, yeah — we’ve got a little bit farther than I expected.’”

Because PEOPLE is generally solid, this timeline checks out, and I knew it would because here’s a very weird coincidence: I met my wife while working at Applebee’s when we were both in our early 20s. For starters, Laura wouldn’t have been a 17-year-old server because most states have strict laws against minors serving alcohol, so that raised an eyebrow right there.

What really sealed the deal that this rumor was garbage? Laura Bargatze has a LinkedIn profile that shows she went to Middle State Tennessee University from 2001 to 2005. When she married Nate in October 2006, she was a year out from her bachelor’s degree, something that famously does not happen to 17 year olds.

As for Nate, he was born in 1979, which does make him 27 when they got married. However, going by her college admission date, Laura was most likely 22 or 23, which gives them a completely normal age gap. More pointedly, no one was marrying any teenagers here, so please use your head before you spread this stuff. Just because Nate is going mask off, that doesn’t make it open season to lie. I know Twitter and the 2016 primary made confirmation bias everyone’s crack of choice, but it’d be nice if we broke that cycle.