Sex Trafficking Survivor Detests Being in Republicans’ SOTU Response

The sex trafficking survivor who was mentioned by Republican Senator Katie Britt in the State of the Union rebuttal says her story was totally warped by the senator as part of an attack on Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“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,” Karla Jacinto Romero told CNN on Sunday. Jacinto Romero also confirmed that no one from Britt’s team had reached out to her asking to share her story.

In her widely criticized State of the Union response, Britt shared the graphic story of a woman who was raped by human traffickers for years.

“When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said in her speech, seeming to imply that this happened in the United States during Biden’s presidency.

Britt’s communications director has already stated that the woman in the story was Jacinto Romero. And Jacinto Romero, in her interview with CNN, is confirming a viral TikTok that Britt got all the dates—and some other details—wrong.

In reality, Jacinto Romero was kept in captivity in Mexico from 2004 to 2008, when President George W. Bush was president. She was not trafficked in the United States, nor was she trafficked by drug cartels as Britt alleged in her speech, but by a pimp who kidnapped young girls.

Jacinto Romero also disputes Britt’s version of the story, which made it seem like the two women met in a private meeting.

Jacinto Romero told CNN that she actually met Britt at an anti-trafficking event last year at the southern border, with several other government officials in attendance, including Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi.

As these clarifications have come to light, how has Britt responded? Well, she’s doubling down of course.

When Fox News host Shannon Bream asked Britt Sunday if she meant to imply that this all happened during Biden’s presidency, Britt responded, “No. I very specifically said, ‘This is what President Biden did during his first 100 days.’ He stopped all deportations, he halted construction of the border wall and he said, ‘I’m going to give amnesty to millions.’ Those types of things act as a magnet to help more and more people here.”

She followed up that sentence with the statement, “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”

Donald Trump may have just landed himself in hot water—again—over E. Jean Carroll, as the former president simply cannot accept that he lost both of her lawsuits against him.

Trump appeared Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, and he promptly took aim at Carroll. He called her “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,” referring to the store where he assaulted her, and said her story was a “false allegation” and that he had never met her before.

Just two days prior, during a rally in Georgia, Trump told supporters he had been forced to post bond on a “totally made up story.”

“Based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of it. I know nothing about her,” Trump continued.

He also claimed Carroll’s lawyers are “Democratic operatives” and the presiding judge—with whom Trump and his lawyers repeatedly clashed—was a “disaster.”

Trump posted a whopping $91.6 million bond last week, which covers the $83.3 million he was ordered to pay in damages for defaming Carroll and interest for putting off payment for so long. Trump only just beat the deadline to post: Had he waited one more business day, Carroll’s lawyers could have started seizing his assets to collect.

But now, Trump has handed Carroll’s legal team fresh ammunition. The day after Trump’s comments in Georgia, legal analyst Lisa Rubin said since Trump had made the comments after he posted bond, it would be difficult to keep penalizing him for the same lawsuit.

“Should E. Jean Carroll and her team want any further relief now, their only option is to file another case,” Rubin said on MSNBC’s The Weekend.

“I think her recourse here is to sue again or at the very least to oppose the bond.”

Carroll’s attorneys sent a letter Monday to presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan indicating that they do not oppose the bond. But Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) has indicated that they haven’t ruled out a third defamation lawsuit.

“The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years,” Kaplan told reporter Maggie Haberman. “As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll.”

Carroll’s other lawyer, Shawn Crowley, had also hinted that there might be another lawsuit in Trump’s future. “We’re watching, we’re listening,” she said in February. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”

Representative Nancy Mace, an outspoken sexual assault survivor, had a baffling response when asked why she continues to support rapist Donald Trump for president.

Mace, who endorsed Trump in January, appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week. When host George Stephanopolous asked Mace how she can “square” her support for Trump with his being found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and then defaming her, Mace immediately began repeatedly accusing Stephanopoulos of trying to “shame” her for being sexually assaulted.

When Stephanopolous reiterated that a jury had found Trump liable for rape, a decision upheld by the presiding judge and then reinforced by a second jury, Mace snapped, “It was not a criminal court, number one.”

“Number two, I live with shame, and you’re asking me a question about my political choices, trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting,” Mace continued. “And quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments, when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was gonna buy? It makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape.”

Stephanopolous pointed out that getting defamed by the sitting president also makes it harder for women to come forward, but Mace stuck to her guns. As of Monday morning, the pinned post on her X (formerly Twitter) account says, “There is nothing ‘valiant’ about shaming a rape victim.”

The irony was lost on Mace, but not Carroll. The popular author tweeted Sunday afternoon, “I wish Representative @RepNancyMace well. And I salute all survivors for their strength, endurance, and holding on to their sanity.”

Obviously, survivors of sexual assault should never be shamed for the attack. But Mace’s mental gymnastics here are just the latest demonstration of the congresswoman’s stunning hypocrisy.

According to Mace, it only counts as rape if the attacker is found guilty in a criminal court, not a civil court as Trump was. By this logic, sexual assault isn’t such a big deal, because out of every 1,000 instances of rape, only 13 get referred to a prosecutor. Only seven actually result in a felony conviction.

In fact, by her own logic, was Mace even attacked? Because she did not report the assault to the police. Again, that is her completely within her right, but she can’t then argue that being found liable for rape doesn’t count.

Mace has made her story of surviving sexual assault a major part of her political identity. She said it took her 25 years to share the story, after she was raped at just 16 years old, and it was one of the hardest things she’s ever done.

But for all her talk about helping victims of sexual assault, she hasn’t fully showed up for them when it comes to actual votes. Despite urging her party to adopt more moderate stances on abortion, for example, she then turns right around and falls in line with her party every single time.

As a reminder, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll. The judge in the case went out of his way to clarify that as we understand the common definition of the word “rape,” Trump can be considered a rapist. The former president owes Carroll a total of $88.3 million—$5 million for assaulting her and defaming her, and the rest for defaming her a separate time.

After being awarded the $83.3 million in damages, Carroll vowed to spend the money on “something Donald Trump hates.”

“Perhaps a fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump,” she said.

One of Donald Trump’s former fixers has turned into a headache that just won’t go away.

Attorneys for Rudy Giuliani’s creditors negotiating his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed a request on Thursday, demanding that Giuliani reveal his financial secrets, including details on his cable TV earnings, the origin of his legal defense fund (led by his son), and even the nature of his work for Trump.

The far-reaching order is only possible thanks to allegations that Giuliani participated in “discovery misconduct”—that is to say, he failed to spill all the beans the first time around when he was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“Indeed, it was Giuliani’s discovery misconduct in the Freeman Litigation—concerning Giuliani’s defamatory statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers—that led U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to enter a $148 million default judgment against Giuliani,” reads the motion, obtained by Law & Crime,

“Judge Howell found Giuliani’s misconduct in the Freeman Litigation so egregious that she further ordered immediate dissolution of the automatic thirty-day stay of enforcement of the judgment, allowing the plaintiffs in the Freeman Litigation to take immediate steps to enforce the judgment,” the motion continued, noting that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” effectively lost him the case by default.

The attorneys argue that Giuliani has every reason to continue to lie and hide his assets without a court order, especially as he wrestles with the multimillion-dollar judgment for defaming Freeman and Moss. Meanwhile, Giulani has several other legal woes, including other defamation suits from Hunter Biden, Dominion Voting Systems, and Smartmatic, not to mention the Georgia election-interference case in which Giuliani is one of more than a dozen co-defendants. And on top of all that, there’s still one more lawsuit against Giuliani—one of his former business associates, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault.

Attorneys for Giuliani’s creditors argue that all those threats could pose up to $4 billion in potential damages—an extremely tall order for anyone to contend with, but especially for an unpaid attorney with a reported $10 million in assets.

While pretty much everybody unanimously hated the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, at least one conservative loved it … albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Republicans tapped one of their youngest lawmakers, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, to helm the response. Over the course of 17 choked-up minutes, Britt, holed up in a kitchen somewhere, staccato-skipped her way through heavy topics, including immigration, sex trafficking, the curtailing of human rights (but not women’s), national security, and foreign affairs. Between the awkward pain behind her voice that most viewers read as disingenuous, and the Steven King–esque smile glitched between forced sorrows, Bette Midler rated Britt’s performance a D-, and her policies an F.

But amid the frenzy of criticism, Alabama’s other senator, Tommy Tuberville, attempted to pass along a compliment to the 42-year-old. Still, even he couldn’t see past the image of a little woman tucked away behind her big kitchen table.

“She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” Tuberville told HuffPost, apparently seeing the diminished image as a good thing. “I mean, she did what she was asked to do. I thought she did a good job. And it’s hard when you’ve never done anything like that.”

Tuberville said much the same during a Newsmax appearance on Friday, claiming Britt was the right choice (to be used by the party hell-bent on stripping abortion access) because “she’s a mom” and a “housewife.”

People were, unsurprisingly, aghast at the patronizing message.

“Journalists should just ask Tommy Tuberville about everything; he’s always going to say the dumbest fucking thing possible,” posted Hysteria podcast host Erin Gloria Ryan.

“‘Picked as a housewife.’ Britt is a United States senator. Just like Tuberville is,” wrote Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman.

It’s just another of a dozen such blunders that Tuberville has made in recent memory, highlighting his complete disregard for how the other half of the human race lives. Last month, Tuberville let slip that he couldn’t be bothered to read up on a court decision that stripped in vitro fertilization access within his state, even in the days that followed the ruling.