A rumor spread across social media in late April 2026 that a resurfaced 2017 television news clip showed Usha Vance, wife of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, alongside White House Correspondents' Association dinner shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen — and that this supposedly proved the shooting was staged.
One Instagram post spreading the rumor captioned the video, "A resurfaced video from Los Angeles ABC 7 shows the White House Correspondents Dinner suspect in the same March 2017 news clip with Usha Vance. What a coincidence."
The claim circulated (archived) on X, Threads, Instagram and Facebook. Multiple readers also contacted us asking whether the woman in the clip really was Vance.
The users sharing the claim miscaptioned the footage. The video is authentic and does show Allen at a 2017 event. However, the woman in the clip is not Vance. She is Arati Desai Wagabaza, founder and then-CEO of SmallCircles, a startup that appeared at the event.
We reached out to Wagabaza via LinkedIn and will update this story if we receive a response.
What the video actually shows
The clip originated from Los Angeles' KABC in March 2017. It was part of a news segment about an "Aging into the Future" technology conference in Los Angeles.
The original report, titled "'Aging into the Future' conference brings new tech to help seniors," identified Allen as a California Institute of Technology student demonstrating a wheelchair emergency-brake device. Fox News reposted the same footage in April 2026.
Who is the woman in the video?
A banner behind the woman in the footage reads "SmallCircles," the name of a startup that appeared at the 2017 event.
(Instagram account @roguednc)
That banner led us to archived versions of SmallCircles' now-defunct website, which showed the same woman and identified her as Arati Desai Wagabaza, the company's founder and CEO:
(smallcircles.co via Wayback Machine)
A GitHub profile for Wagabaza also lists her affiliation as "SmallCircles, Inc." in Santa Monica, California, and links to smallcircles.co. Therefore, based on the banner visible in the KABC footage, the archived SmallCircles website and Wagabaza's public affiliation with the company, the woman in the clip is Wagabaza — not Vance.
Moreover, Vance was residing in Washington, D.C., during that period, where she clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts during the Supreme Court's 2017-18 term. We found no evidence connecting her to the Los Angeles conference.
Bottom line
All in all, the 2017 KABC video is real and does show Allen, then a Caltech student, demonstrating a wheelchair safety device. However, the woman in the clip is not Vance. Available evidence identifies her as Wagabaza, founder and then-CEO of SmallCircles. We found no evidence Allen was connected to Vance through the video, nor any evidence that the footage proves the White House correspondents' dinner shooting was staged.
For more on claims about the shooting, we also fact-checked whether an image showed the suspect wearing an Israeli army sweatshirt and whether Karoline Leavitt said there would be "shots fired" before the incident.