Sex Trafficking Survivor Calls Out Katie Britt for Misrepresenting Her Story

Nikki McCann Ramirez
·3 min read
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A sex trafficking survivor whose story was used by Sen. Katie Britt during her disastrous State of the Union rebuttal called the senator’s characterization of her story “unfair.”

On Thursday, Britt said in her State of the Union rebuttal that during a recent visit to the southern border, she spoke to a woman who was “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12.” Britt blamed President Joe Biden for the woman’s plight. “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable,” she said.

Shortly after the speech aired, independent journalist Jonathan M. Katz identified the woman in Britt’s story as Karla Jacinto, who was trafficked in Mexico, not the U.S., between 2004 and 2008 — more than a decade before Biden assumed the presidency.

During a Sunday interview with CNN, Jacinto, whom Britt’s office confirmed was the woman referenced in the story, said that she rarely chooses to “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.” Jacinto, who’s become a prominent anti-sex trafficking activist, has also stated that she was not trafficked by the drug cartels, but by a man who acted as a “professional pimp.”

“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,” Jacinto added. “People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”

Britt insisted to Fox News earlier on Sunday that she had not misrepresented Jacinto’s story, telling host Shannon Bream that she “very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager, I didn’t say a young woman. A grown woman, a woman, when she was trafficked, when she was 12,” after being pressed multiple times regarding the veracity of her story.

“The drug cartels are winning under this. This is a story of what is happening now at an astronomical rate, and we have to bring attention to it,” Britt added.

The White House itself hit back at Britt’s false claims, stating on Sunday that “instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union.”

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