Exclusive: 'Warrior Princess' Mindy Budgor Responds to Critics

In early September, Mindy Budgor, a well-off twentysomething from Southern California, wrote an intriguing memoir—"Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior," about her experience living with a tribe in Africa and becoming its first woman warrior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for the media coverage—and storm of criticisms—to come rolling in. A female member of the Maasai tribe, blogging for the Huffington Post, was suspicious of Budgor's ability to buck the system in a matter of months. Africa Is a Country, meanwhile, accused Budgor of going to Kenya as part of a PR campaign for a sportswear company. And many of the nearly 3,000 comments Yahoo Shine's story about Budgor were negative, calling for a boycott of her book, accusing her of exploiting the Maasai tribe, and charging that her return to the comforts of home negated her entire warrior-princess claim. This week, Budgor has decided to meet the criticisms head-on with the following post.