Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., has been having an interesting week. After being raked over the coals in all corners of the news and entertainment sphere — including "The View" — for her bizarre "tradwife" response to President Biden's State of the Union address on Thursday, a journalist has pieced together that she took some creative liberties with a story she told during her speech, which she framed as a slam against the president although the event she described apparently took place years before he was in office, and didn't happen quite like she told it.
During her kitchen-side rebuttal, Britt recounted a trip to the Del Rio sector of the Texas border where she paints a picture of a conversation had with a person believed to be Karla Jacinto Romero, who was sex trafficked in Mexico — not the United States, as the senator suggested — from 2004 to 2008, twenty years before Biden became president, per CNBC's coverage of journalist Jonathan Katz's sleuthing.
“We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third-world country,” Britt said after recycling the tale. “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable.” And beyond the timeline being off here, and the misdirected finger-pointing, there's a big question mark at the end of her presenting this as though it was something told directly to her.
“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,” Katz said in a now viral TikTok.
In reality, Britt visited the Del Rio area in January 2023 on a joint trip with Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., and during that trip Jacinto Romero appeared at a press conference where she publicly relayed her story.
@katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp
♬ original sound - Jonathan M. Katz
