Star Of Britt’s Human Trafficking Saga Accuses Her Of ‘Distorting’ ‘Using Story For Political Purposes’

If there is one Republican who is even more miserable these days than Mike Johnson, it would have to be Katie Britt. As a matter of fact, Johnson is probably grateful to her for taking the spotlight off of his inadequacy for a few days. It’s given him a breather. The latest wrinkle in the Britt saga is that Karla Jacinto Romero, the star of Britt’s story, has come forward to blow holes in the story that Britt told. Daily Beast:

In an interview Sunday, CNN’s Rafael Romo asked Romero if she felt her story had been used for “political purposes” in the U.S. “Yes,” Romero, speaking from Mexico City, said in response. “In fact I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo, and that to me is not fair.”

“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic—all the governors, all the senators—to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking, because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time,” Romero added, according to CNN’s translation of her comments. “People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.” […]

“‘Someone using my story and distorting it for political purposes,’ she told me, ‘Is not fair at all,’” Romo said Romero told him. […]

Romero also told the network that Sen. Britt got multiple elements of her story wrong. She was trafficked by a pimp who worked to force vulnerable girls into prostitution, Romero said, not Mexican drug cartels. She was also never trafficked inside the U.S.; while Britt did not explicitly say Romero had been trafficked in the U.S., some viewers may have got that impression from the senator’s phrase: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country; this is the United States of America.”

It was happening in a Third World country. That’s exactly where it was happening. And it wasn’t anywhere near the time of Joe Biden’s presidency, it was some twenty years earlier, and it had nothing to do with drug cartels. The good Christian lady, sitting in her kitchen with her diamond crucifix told a tall tale that could have choked Jonah’s whale. Yet she expected that America would swallow it whole, evidently.

The blow back from this continues with none other than Fox News and Charlie Kirk giving Britt hell. You know you are doomed in right-wingnuttia when that has happened.

“Nobody is questioning that the story happened and she is actually who she is and says she is and that does happen, the question is about the timing and implication of you telling this story,” Bream told the senator before asking: “Did you mean to give the impression this horrible story happened on President Biden’s watch?”

Britt dodged the question, instead pivoting to recounting Biden’s first 100 days worth of immigration policies, indirectly suggesting human-trafficking has been “invited” by the president and has increased under his watch.

“The liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, then there are victims all throughout our country,” Britt said. “To me, it’s disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that is one of the things the drug cartels are profiting most off of.”

An unconvinced Bream further pushed back on the senator: “To be clear, the story you relayed is not something that’s happened under the Biden administration, that particular person?”

Britt’s response, days after her spokesperson told news outlets the story she shared was “100% correct,” was to leave the woman unnamed and indirectly admit the story was decades-old while not addressing whether she meant to imply it was Biden’s fault.

And the cherry on the sundae here is that Britt managed to incur the wrath of Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s main beef, and actually he has a good point here, is that Britt should have used her normal speaking voice rather than her little fundie southern belle schtick. I don’t know who made that choice for her, but that is where the speech derailed from the get go into Never Never Land.

Charlie Kirk called Britt a “C-Level replacement actress for a Netflix special.” “This is Super Bowl. It’s either you make the field goal, or you don’t. And she missed,” he added. “If she would have spoke how she actually speaks as a human being, I think it would have been a home run. She should have fired the people around her that wrote her speech.”

The central problem here, though, which has been danced around but not confronted directly is this: What the Republican party thinks will appeal to women and they’re at least thirty years out of step if not more so. The GOP believes that some original approach must be taken with women, something fear oriented, some threat to home and children is what will get through. I disagree with that. I think the GOP is bleeding women voters because they have no platform of substance and they’re not going to earn back the female vote until they get a platform together that will earn all the votes across the spectrum.

I think the time has come for the GOP to stop doing what they always accuse the Democrats of doing, and that’s playing identity politics. Just put together a party and a platform that is worth a damn and stop worrying about how to trick and manipulate the voter, female or otherwise. I disagree with Charlie Kirk that Britt’s normal voice would have hit a home run. But it would not have been so utterly insulting to our collective intelligence (and I say men and women with “our”) and not ended up as an SNL skit two days later.