Many Americans probably thought the worst part of Katie Britt's GOP response to Thursday night's State of the union address was that it was poorly delivered. But that, it turns out, was the least of the problems with Britt's oratorical effort. We now know that the speech was fact-challenged -- and that is putting it charitably. Here is the more blunt truth: The main segment of Britt's speech, about a supposed series of sex-trafficking incidents near the U.S.-Mexico border, was packed with lies.
In a Forbes report today, Britt stands by her speech, mostly. Under the headline "Katie Britt Says She Knew Sex-Trafficking Incident Didn’t Happen Under Biden," reporter Ana Faguy writes:
Britt first dodged a question about the anecdote on Fox News Sunday by listing her frustrations with Biden’s policies, including halting construction of the border wall and stopping deportations which Britt said act as a “magnet” to bring more people to the U.S.
When Fox News’ Shannon Bream pushed Britt to get into the specifics of the story, Britt claimed she was clear in her remarks she spoke to a woman “who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” implying the anecdote was not a recent one and the woman was speaking about her past.
Crucial Quote
“I very clearly said, I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” Britt said Sunday. “So I didn’t say, a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman, a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12.”
In a statement Sunday, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates accused Britt of telling “more debunked lies to justify the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history.” Bates said Britt should “stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union."
At NBC News, reporter Alexandra Marquez wrote:
On “Fox News Sunday,” Britt did not acknowledge making any mistake or leaving a wrong impression.She was asked whether she meant to give the impression that the story she told about a victim of human trafficking happened during Biden’s tenure.
“No,” Britt answered, adding later: “I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12, so I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman, a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12.”
She doubled down on her Thursday statement that Biden “didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.”
“I very specifically said this is what President Biden did during his first 100 days. Minutes after coming into office he stopped all deportations, he halted construction of the border wall,” she said Sunday. (The Biden administration attempted to institute a 100-day pause on mass deportations after taking office, but that moratorium was later halted by a judge.)
Though Britt did not offer the victim’s name in her speech Thursday, a spokesperson for her office told The Washington Post that she was referring to Karla Jacinto Romero, a trafficking victims’ rights advocate who testified before Congress in 2015 about what happened to her as a girl.
Britt’s office did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News on Saturday.
Over the weekend, a spokesperson for Britt, a junior U.S. Senator (R-AL) claimed Britt's speech, which centered on a story suggesting President Joe Biden was responsible for a series of sex-trafficking incidents near the U.S.-Mexico border, was "100 percent correct." But reporting from The Washington Post indicates that explanation is not going to fly. It remains to be seen if Britt ever will admit fault and perhaps issue an apology to the president and the public. It also is unclear if the Republican Party and the Trump campaign were in on the scheme to smear Biden. They likely had heavy input on the content of Britt's speech, so did they encourage her to lie? If so, what could be the repercussions of that? Could it be election fraud? Could Katie Britt's political career be in jeopardy? Does this seemingly deliberate effort to smear Joe Biden in order to influence an election need to be investigated?According to a report at Newsweek, Britt is being accused of telling a "whopping lie"regarding the sex-trafficking story. Whatever explanations and defenses or explanations Britt spews forth, many political observers do not seem to be buying them.
Journalist Jonathan Katz, exposed Britt's dishonesty, and The Guardian explains how he did it, under the headline "Journalist says Katie Britt’s story about child sex abuse is an‘out-and-out lie’; Jonathan Katz accuses Britt of being ‘dishonest’ in State of the Union rebuttal with story about Karla Jacinto Romero":
Doubts have been cast on the accuracy of a story about horrific child sex abuse told by the Republican senator Katie Britt in her widely ridiculed speech delivered in rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
The journalist and author Jonathan Katz has accused Britt of being “fundamentally dishonest” for invoking the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times to illustrate the supposed failure of the Biden administration’s border-control policies.
The controversy further intensifies the spotlight on Britt – a rising Republican star – after she came under fire from members of her own party for delivering a rejoinder to Biden on Thursday from the setting of a kitchen.
In that speech, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of an unidentified woman, whom Britt said confided harrowing experiences. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.
“I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me,” Britt said. “She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.”
Britt's story had holes from the outset, and now we know why: it is largely false. From The Guardian:
The senator did not say where or when the events occurred, but in outraged tones she implied that they had happened in the U.S. on Biden’s watch: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable, and it’s almost entirely preventable.”
However, in a seven-minute video posted on TikTok, Katz – a former AP reporter who has written on drug wars in Mexico – cited details that appeared to show the story Britt was describing had happened not just outside the U.S., but many years before Biden became president.
Josh Marshall, of Taking Points Memo, praised Katz for catching Britt "in an out and out lie." From a report at Raw Story:He concluded that Britt had deliberately misrepresented the tale of Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico.
Katz's digging turned up proof the victim didn't experience the attacks on American soil, but he also found that the timeline proved Biden wasn't even in office.
There was a trip that Britt took along with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) to the the Del Rio Sector last January — all documented on Blackburn's website.
Katz then cross-referenced the details and found the name: Karla Jacinto Romero, who is described as being pimped by a 22-year-old man at the age of 12, and "enslaved until the age of 16 in brothels, roadside motels and homes in Guadalajara and other cities in Mexico."
These events didn't happen in the United States," said Katz. "These crimes didn't take place in the United States. Or even near the border. They took place in Mexico."
And they also took place, according to Romero's recounting before Congress, between 2004 and 2008.
Biden didn't become vice president until 2009. The president at the time when Romero was kidnapped and ultimately rescued was George W. Bush.
Who is Karla Jacinto Romero, and what happened to her? The truth is quite a bit different from Katie Britt's tale. The Guardian: reports:
Now 31, Romero testified to a US Congressional subcommittee in May 2015 describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued. She has also spoken before the Mexican house of representatives and the Vatican.
Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with two other Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Cindy-Hyde Smith, in January 2023.
The visit was described on Blackburn’s senatorial webpage, which included photos of the three senators sharing a platform with Romero at a news conference.
Britt's fabrications apparently were designed to boost Donald Trump's campaign by making Biden look weak and ineffective on the border. She probably would have gotten away with it if Jonathan Katz had not sniffed out the story:
In his video, Katz dissected what he said was Britt’s attempt to conflate Romero’s story with the US-Mexico border imbroglio, where the build-up of asylum seekers promises to become a central issue in the 2024 presidential election, before lambasting her for “dishonesty”.
Katz said that Britt, by not giving a location or a timeframe for the story, had deliberately tried to create a “beyond misleading” impression that the events had taken place recently and on U.S. soil.
“All I had to do was key in Karla Jacinto Romero’s name … and it took me to [her] testimony to Congress from 2015 about her experiences in Mexico,” he said.
“It took place between 2004 and 2008. I don’t know what they put in the textbooks of Alabama these days, but Joe Biden was not the president of the United States in 2004 or 2008. In 2004 and 2008, the president of the United States was George W Bush, a Republican. [But] none of this really matters because none of these events took place in the United States – or even near the border.”
Katz added: “It seems very clear to me that she is trying to create an association in people’s minds between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans, you know, Latins – people of Latin descent – and sexual violence. That’s what she’s going for and she is doing it on the basis of something that you can only say is an out-and-out lie.
“It must have been obvious to her, at the very least, that she was not talking to somebody who had recently been 12 years old.”
Trump long has been known as a liar of epic proportions, so perhaps it makes sense that he and Britt have found common ground. Britt's tall tale also should raise questions about the integrity of her longtime mentor -- retired Alabama Senator Richard Shelby:
Katz said he had sought a comment from Britt’s spokesperson but had received no reply. “For now, it just looks as if she got up on national television and lied about something really horrific and important – and for her own personal and her party’s political gain,” he said.
In a statement to media outlets, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross sidestepped commenting on whether the senator had been alluding to Romero in Thursday’s speech but insisted her account was “100 percent correct”.
“The Biden administration’s policies – the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane – have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border,” he said. “Along that journey, children, women and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.”
Does Britt's spokesman also have a tortured relationship with the truth? That appears to be distinctly possible. The Guardian notes some disturbing irony in the Britt-Trump alliance:
Following Britt’s speech, the gun-control advocate Shannon Watts noted that the senator had used stories of sexual abuse in an effort to elect Donald Trump, who has been accused of rape in an allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and of assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women. “Senator Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a sexual predator [who was judicially found to be a rapist in a civil proceeding],” Watts said.
Raw Story writes that The Washington Post reportedly has confirmed the truth behind the sex-trafficking story/ And we have seen no reports that Katie Britt or her spokesman have come completely clean.
After noting Sean Ross' claim that Britt's story is "100 percent correct," Raw Story states that explanation is weak, and it quotes from The Washington Post's story on the matter:
The Post, however, vehemently disagreed [with Ross' assertion].
"Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration," according to The Post's fact check. "But Biden has nothing to do with Romero’s story."
The article continues by suggesting Romero was "never trafficked in the United States."
"In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language," the article states. "Romero’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios."
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