Katie Britt went from fringe politician to household name in the course of one 17-minute speech. The Alabama junior senator was tapped to provide the GOP’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, and she fumbled it spectacularly.
Delivering the entire eerie performance through an unflinching smile and wide, manic eyes, Britt not only served as new fodder for American nightmares, but also lied her way through nearly every talking point laid out in front of her. In the wake of her speech — past the initial rush to meme her Handmaid’s Tale-esque performance — people quickly started poking holes in her assertions, and a domino effect soon served to tarnish Britt’s reputation for good.
Within a few days of the speech’s instant rocket to virality, a past acquaintance of Britt’s took to social media to speak out. Apologizing for arriving several days late to the game, Twitter user @lchap83, who goes by Lindsay on the app, explained that she went to college with Katie Britt. Noting that she’s been waiting years for Britt to reveal her true colors, Lindsay jokes that the Republican congresswoman has been “asking to see the manager since we were 19.”
But that was just the start. While people were busy chuckling over Lindsay’s coy method of calling Britt a Karen, much more serious accusations were gaining speed online. These came from Karla Jacinto Romero, an anti-trafficking advocate who took center stage in Britt’s March 7 video. Britt even teared up a bit as she discussed the horrifying history that led to Romero becoming an anti-trafficking advocate, a story she presented as though it was shared personally with her.
But that’s not the version of events Romero outlined in a CNN interview with Rafael Romo. While Britt blasted Biden for inviting “a border crisis,” Romero revealed that not only was she not trafficked by the Mexican drug cartels, as Britt claimed, but also that she wasn’t snatched from the U.S. She was grabbed in Mexico, and moreover, it took place long before Joe Biden had any control over border safety. Romero was in captivity from 2004 to 2008, while former Republican President George W. Bush was in office.
Romero also claims she never met with Britt one-on-one, as the senator indicated, and criticized her attempt to twist Romero’s harrowing story in the GOP’s favor. Noting that she “never cooperate[s] with politicians” because they use her story for political purposes, Romero urged Britt to “take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”
Britt attempted to push back on the harsh criticism that came with Romero’s response, but once again mucked the process up royally. She tried to claim that everything she said was “100 percent correct,” and denied that she worked to present the story as if it had happened under Biden’s watch. Most repugnantly, she once again worked to twist the narrative in her favor by claiming to Fox News that its “disgusting to try to silence… the story of what it is like to be sex-trafficked.”
Honestly, how dare she. No one is trying to silence Romero — in fact, we’re all trying to let her speak for herself. It is Britt who insists she knows better than the woman who actually endured that horrific treatment, which makes her attempts to throw blame at her detractors all the more disgusting. She’s just digging herself into a deeper hole, at this point, and we can’t help but hope she never makes her way back to the surface.