The woman at the center of Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s controversial response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address is calling the account inaccurate and used without her permission.
Britt talked about Karla Jacinto Romero, who testified before Congress about being held in Mexican brothels twenty years ago. Alabama’s junior U.S. Senator used the incident as an in indictment of President Joe Biden’s immigration policy. Jacinto’s ordeal took place when President George W. Bush was in office. She told CNN that no one in Britt’s office asked for permission to use her story during the SOTU response, which was lampooned during Saturday Night Live and during Sunday night’s telecast of the Oscars.
The victim has previously spoken publicly about the abuse happening in her home country of Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — not in the United States during the Biden administration. Yet, Britt used the account to chastise Biden's action on the border.
"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," Britt said in the Thursday night speech televised from her home in Alabama. "President Biden's border crisis is a disgrace."
Britt has made immigration one of her top issues in her first years in the Senate, and Republicans have seized on a surge of immigrants entering the country during Biden's term to attack the president. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination this year, blames Biden for the killing of a Georgia nursing student after an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally was arrested and charged with her murder.
Independent journalist Jonathan Katz revealed in a TikTok video Friday that the sex trafficking of the victim mentioned by Britt on Thursday did not happen during the Biden administration or in the United States.
Britt spokesman Sean Ross on Saturday confirmed to The Associated Press that the senator was speaking about the account of a young Mexican woman who told of being repeatedly raped in Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — when Republican George W. Bush was the U.S. president.
Ross said people are still victims of "disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels."
Asked by Fox News Sunday if she had meant to give the impression that the trafficking and rape in question happened during the Biden administration, Britt said "No." She said she had recounted the victim's story to "bring some light to" sex trafficking by cartels.
Britt's rebuttal, delivered from her own kitchen table, laid out a dark vision for the country under Democrats and warned of violence. She talked about her two children and warned that "life is getting more and more dangerous."
