A sex trafficking survivor slammed Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) after the lawmaker inaccurately used her story in a response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as part of an attack on his border policies.
Britt’s communications director confirmed that Britt was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, a woman who has previously testified before Congress about being forced to work in brothels in Mexico 20 years ago. Speaking to CNN, Romero said no one from Britt’s camp or anywhere else contacted her asking for permission to use her story in the GOP’s SOTU response, and she also confirmed allegations from a viral TikTok video that Britt’s telling of that story was, at best, completely misleading.
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.”
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“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.”
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.”
Romero’s captivity also took place between 2004-08, during President George W. Bush’s second term. Again, Britt did not specifically say when Romero had been trafficked, but presented her story in the context of the “disgrace” of Biden’s border policies. Lastly, Romero confirmed she met Britt at an event on the border that was attended by multiple other government officials and anti-human trafficking activists—a detail that Britt omitted, making their meeting sound like a more private, personal encounter.
“‘Someone using my story and distorting it for political purposes,’ she told me, ‘Is not fair at all,’” Romo said Romero told him.
Earlier Sunday, Britt was grilled on Fox News about the row and was pressed to confirm that the person she’d spoken about had not been trafficked since Biden entered the Oval Office. “I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” Britt said. “So I didn’t say ‘a teenager,’ I didn’t say ‘a young woman,’ [but rather] a grown woman,” implying that she’d made it clear that the woman’s trafficking experience was clearly related as having happened a long time ago.
“Listening to her story, she is a victims’ rights advocate who is telling: ‘This is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they are profiting off of women,’” Britt continued, repeating the cartel claim that Romero says is false. “It is disgusting, so I am hopeful that it brings some light to it and we can actually do something about human trafficking and that’s what the media actually decides to cover.”
