Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt is below fireplace for utilizing what seems to be a intercourse trafficking sufferer’s expertise from the early 2000s to sentence President Joe Biden and his border coverage.
Britt gave the GOP rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union tackle to Congress this week.
Throughout her rebuttal, Britt referenced a go to to the Del Rio sector of the Texas border the place she depicted a seemingly private dialog with somebody who had survived intercourse trafficking by teams within the U.S.
“That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me,” Britt mentioned within the video. “She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12.”
The sufferer Britt referenced was Karla Jacinto Romero, who was intercourse trafficked in Mexico — not the US, because the senator recommended — from 2004 to 2008, twenty years earlier than the Democrat Biden grew to become president.
The journalist Jonathan Katz first pieced collectively Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s expertise in a TikTok video.
Britt seemingly tried to current the anecdote as a damning instance of Biden’s border administration.
“We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third-world country,” she added. “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable.”
However Jacinto Romero didn’t expertise intercourse trafficking within the U.S. because of Biden’s border coverage — as a result of he was not president from 2004 to 2008 and since she was intercourse trafficked in Mexico.
Katz slammed Britt for the implication that Jacinto Romero divulged her experiences privately.
“Britt tells it like she’s sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande, like holding her hand, like getting her to tell the story that she won’t tell anyone else,” he mentioned.
As an alternative, he added, Jacinto Romero is a public advocate for intercourse trafficking and has repeatedly shared her story publicly to make clear the difficulty. Jacinto Romero has testified to U.S. Congress, the Mexican Home of Representatives and the Vatican, in line with a brief 2015 profile in a U.S. Home of Representatives doc.
Britt visited the Del Rio space in January 2023 on a joint journey with Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss. Throughout that journey, Jacinto Romero appeared at a press convention with Britt, Blackburn and Hyde-Smith the place she publicly relayed her grueling sex-trafficking story.
Britt has confronted a flurry of on-line criticism for the reason that anecdote was uncovered as misplaced, compounding earlier disapproval about her rebuttal’s supply.
“So not only was Katie Britt a flaming embarrassment. She is also an out and out liar. Alabama’s finest!” political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote in an X post.
Ornstein is part of a broader refrain of journalists and others slamming Britt for her storytelling.
“This was old Alabama politics. The politics of fear and confusion,” Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote on X. “Britt blamed Biden for an assault that appears to have happened 20 years ago. Her spokesman won’t give a clear answer when asked.”
Christine Pelosi, political strategist and daughter of former Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanded in a Saturday X post that Britt apologize “for lying about the horrific case of sexual violence that you exploited for political purposes.”
Sean Ross, spokesperson for Sen. Britt, didn’t deny that Jacinto Romero is the sex-trafficking survivor in query however doubled down on Britt’s story.
“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct,” Ross mentioned in an announcement to CNBC. “But there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now.”
Although intercourse trafficking has taken place within the U.S. below the Biden administration, Jacinto Romero’s sex-trafficking story isn’t an instance of it.
“Today, Karla is a happy and successful mother of two beautiful girls, a wife, a student, and an international activist,” reads the 2015 Home doc.
