TikToker casts doubt on Katie Britt's trafficking anecdote from SOTU response

Alabama Sen. Katie Britt on Thursday delivered the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden's State of the Union address, in which she blasted the president's economic and immigration policies.

The speech, recited with heightened drama, was poorly received, including by many members of his own party. Questions are now being raised about whether Britt intentionally misrepresented one of his most memorable anecdotes.

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited him with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days,” Britt said in his remarks. “When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio area of ​​Texas. It was there that I spoke to a woman who told me her story. She had been a victim of sex trafficking by the cartels from the age of 12.

“We would not agree to this happening in a third world country. We are the United States of America,” Britt continued.

The story implied that events took place on Biden's watch and in the United States, since the 42-year-old senator took office in January 2023.

According to a now-viral TikTok posted by journalist Jonathan Katz, none of these insinuations appear to be true.

After watching Britt's speech, Katz said, “I immediately had questions. Who was this woman? How [Britt] to meet her? How did she manage to get him to tell this story?

He did some research, he said, and quickly found obvious answers. “Senator Britt has told this story time and time again,” he said. Just after taking office, she “traveled to South Texas' Del Rio district near the Mexican border” with Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cindy Hyde-Smith, according to reports on the Blackburn website.

Official GOP Response to SOTU Makes Republicans “Lose Their Minds”

During an appearance alongside Fox News contributor Sara Carter, Katz said, Britt learned about a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero, whose story matched Britt's anecdote perfectly.

Romero, now 31, was trafficked between the ages of 12 and 16, according to her biography. During testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2015, Romero said that when she was a child, she was kicked out of her home by her mother and “fell prey to a professional pimp.” .

For the first three months of their relationship, she recalls, her attacker treated her well, but he eventually “forced me to work on the streets for his own gain.” For years and years, I was coerced, intimidated, threatened, beaten, deprived of my children, and emotionally and sexually violated repeatedly.

Romero added that during those four years, she “was forced to serve every type of fetish imaginable to over 40,000 clients.”

In Katz's video, he acknowledged the horrors of Romero's story and did not dispute its credibility.

Still, he said, if Britt was indeed referring to Romero in his State of the Union rebuttal, his telling of the facts was “fundamentally dishonest.” This goes beyond deception.

“I don’t know what they put in the textbooks in Alabama these days. But Joe Biden was not president of the United States in 2004 or 2008. He was not even vice president of the United States,” Katz said.

“And none of that really matters here because these events didn't happen in the United States. These crimes did not take place in the United States or even near the border. They took place in Mexico,” he continued. He later added, “It looks like she just went on national television and lied about something really horrible and really important.” And for his personal and political gain.”

A spokesperson for Britt, Sean Ross, defended the senator's integrity in a statement to Alabama-based Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Kyle Whitmire.

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% accurate. And there are more innocent victims than ever before of this kind of disgusting and brutal cartel trafficking,” he wrote. “The policies of the Biden administration – the policies of this country that the president falsely claims are humane – have empowered the cartels and acted like a magnet to attract historic numbers of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. »

Ross did not immediately respond to an email request from The Daily Beast, which sought clarification on whether Britt was actually referring to Romero.

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