Status Report: The Katie Britt Lie

Fallout from the Alabama senator’s intentionally and highly misleading story continues.

Photo: AP/Mariam Zuhaib

By now you’ve probably heard the news: Sen. Katie Britt’s rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union was not just a painfully bad theatrical performance, one worthy of an SNL cold open by none other than Scarlett Johansson. It also contained at its core a bold-faced lie: that a sex trafficking victim, who was raped repeatedly at age 12, had met with Sen. Britt and was a stark example of Biden’s failed border policies.

The lie was surfaced quickly by freelance journalist Jonathan Katz, a reporter with “years of experience as an Associated Press foreign correspondent in Haiti and Mexico, where he covered things that would make Katie Britt cry real tears,” according to reporting by AL.com. Katz quickly proved that the sexual trafficking and rapes referenced by Senator Britt took place 20 years ago—during the George W. Bush administration. They also took place not in the United States, as Britt had all but declared, but rather in Mexico, and far from the border.

It took a bit of asking from folks online why mainstream media had not picked up such an important story, but in a report finally published on Saturday, the Washington Post was able to confirm the gist of Katz’s reporting. The woman whose story was relayed by Sen. Britt before the entire nation was Karla Jacinto Romero, according to a confirmation by Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director.

Romero is a sexual trafficking victims’ rights advocate. Her story is widely known. In fact, she testified before Congress in 2015 about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008—again, back when George W. Bush was president. Yet Sen. Britt took that story and made it one about the border, which it most certainly was not.

In today’s piece, I’ll focus on three things:

• A breakdown of the dangerous deception perpetrated by Sen. Britt, following the analysis of Katz and the Washington Post;

• The moral depravity it takes not just to lie this way but to actually exploit the story of a sexual trafficking victim for political gain; and

• The deep irony at the heart of Sen. Britt’s emotional plea that we pay attention to stories like the one she told America.

Sen. Britt willfully scammed the American public

It’s hard to forget the moment when Sen. Britt first brought up the story of a woman who, at the age of 12, had been repeatedly raped by cartels. Here were her words on Thursday night before a national audience of millions, fake emotion crackling in her voice:

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

After Sen. Britt was called out for connecting this story somehow to President Biden, reporters began asking her office to confirm a few things. Even with some pressing, her communications director insisted in a written statement that the “story Senator Britt told was 100% correct.”

That’s why we need to unpack the rhetorical jujitsu Sen. Britt deployed to achieve this deception.

As the Washington Post observed, the story above unfolds in five parts.

• She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.

• Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.

• At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”

• She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

• She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

And yet, Biden, the border and the cartels had nothing to do with Romero. According to her testimony, cited by the Post, after her mother threw her out of the house, a pimp took advantage of her, and she spent four years in a brothel, escaping at age 16.

Nor was Romero ever trafficked across the border to the U.S. Instead, she was the victim of sexual tourism, with “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.” That is horrifying in its own way, but decidedly not about the border.

As Jonathan Katz noted in his now viral TikTok video about Britt’s lies, the senator had made it seem like she had met the woman “sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande, … holding her hand … getting her to tell her the story that she won’t tell anyone else.” In fact, Britt met Romero at a press conference organized by three GOP women senators, including Britt, and a Fox News reporter known for inflammatory pieces on immigration.

Sen. Britt tried to scam the entire nation by trying to spin a story from two decades ago about a child victim of sexual tourism into a story today about Biden’s failed policies, sex trafficking across the border, and cartels. For that, the Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios—its worst rating, a real whopper.

Stolen pain and fear-mongering

It takes a complete absence of a moral compass to leverage someone else’s tragic story—one she has carried for decades and made her life’s mission to tell others—into a tool for raw and cynical political gain. But that’s what Sen. Britt did, perhaps because, as the New York Times observed in its follow-up piece, “As a rhetorical device, it would be hard [to] conjure up a more powerful and resonant example.”

The Times found Romero and interviewed her directly about how she felt knowing her story was being leveraged by Britt for entirely different, political purposes. Because we as a nation owe Romero an apology for allowing our dysfunctional politics to overtake and derail her important work, I want to highlight what she told the paper:

Ms. Jacinto, who spoke with the Times Saturday from Mexico, said she had not been informed ahead of time that Ms. Britt would be discussing her in the speech and only learned about it after a video pointing out the deceptive framing of the senator’s speech was posted by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday.

“I only found out via social media,” said Ms. Jacinto, who continues to speak frequently about human trafficking and who is supported by a U.S.-based nonprofit, Reintegra, that provides educational grants to victims of sex trafficking in Latin America. “I thought it was very strange.”

She said she preferred to keep politics out of the question of human trafficking. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she said. “The work I do is not a game.”

Not a game, indeed. U.S. voters, particularly suburbanites who are looking at the question of immigration more closely now and assessing the positions of both parties, may begin to understand the extent to which the GOP is sensationalizing the issue.

Already, the Republicans have pressed the tragic story of Georgia student Laken Riley, who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant, as far they can, mentioning her at every opportunity and even inviting her family to meet with Trump at his recent rally in the state. The point of this is clear: The GOP now seeks to paint all migrants with the same broad unfair brush of criminality. This of course defies government statistics showing that migrants commit fewer crimes than non-migrants and that there is no evidence of the “migrant crime wave” that the Republicans and Fox have raised repeatedly. Instead, crime rates in cities where migrants have been heading are actually down, which would be an inconvenient fact for the GOP narrative if facts actually ever mattered to their base.

Republicans also appear to care far more about this one death, horrific as it is, than about the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by their other policies, from vaccine denialism to their failure to enact sensible gun restrictions. It means, simply put, that they don’t really care about Riley. They just find her death at the hands of a migrant useful.

The cynicism and hypocrisy is breathtaking.

The ultimate irony

I want to close by highlighting a glaring contradiction within Sen. Britt’s rebuttal. On the one hand, she begs us to think of victims like Romero who are suffering, she claims, from being trafficked across our border and sexually assaulted and exploited.

But the logical conclusion of that plea is that we should show more compassion in our asylum laws for women like she described. Instead, Britt supports the kinds of draconian policies that would deny legal protection to sex trafficking victims.

As former Congressmember Tom Malinowski noted,

It’s not just that Katie Britt’s story was false (since the woman she cited was trafficked by cartels within Mexico).

It’s that the border policy she supports would be to send victims like that back to Mexico into the hands of the cartels, with no chance to seek asylum.

The recent House election in NY-3, where the positions of the parties on immigration were tested before voters, proved that Republicans don’t automatically have a winning hand when it comes to the border. This is especially true now that the GOP has rejected the only bipartisan solution to the issue, all because Donald Trump wants to keep wielding it as a political weapon.

It is incumbent upon the media, the public, and our Democratic leaders to call out the cheap ploys and race-baiting that Trump, Britt and the rest of the GOP deploy to rile up the public, all while doing nothing to actually fix the problem.

As President Biden said in his State of the Union, we can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it. All that GOP officials like Sen. Britt offer are more lies, rank hypocrisy and fear. And those have never led to sound policies or solutions, just more division and anxiety.

A quick programming note: I will be out of the country for the next 10 days on a long-planned “bucket list” trip to South Africa with my sister Mimi, who insisted I go before I become a dad and won’t have the time! I’m reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and plan to visit the prison where he was held (yes, I’m a history and political nerd). I will only update this newsletter periodically when we have some downtimes in the mornings before tours, and there won’t be a Xeets and Giggles next Saturday. I’ll resume my regular posts on March 22!