Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a fundraising email Tuesday evening in which she repeated a claim that she had been fired from her first teaching job for being “visibly pregnant.”
However, new evidence that has emerged in the past several days — from left-wing, right-wing, and mainstream media sources — has cast doubt on that claim.
In the subject line of her email, Warren claimed: “By June I was visibly pregnant — and the principal told me the job I’d already been promised for the next year would go to someone else.”
She continued: “My story is not unique. And now, right-wing media outlets are dismissing my story — and in doing so, dismissing many similar stories of other women who have also been affected by pregnancy discrimination.”
The implication was that the principal fired her because of her pregnancy. Warren has repeated the same story on the campaign trail and the debate stage for several months.
However, in a video interview from 2007 highlighted by Jacobin writer (and Democratic Socialists of America member) Meagan Day last Tuesday, Warren said that she chose to leave her job after her first year because she lacked the necessary qualifications and decided, while pursuing the necessary graduate level education courses, that she did not want to continue.
“I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency certificate,’ it was called,” Warren recalled. “And I went back to graduate school, and took a couple of courses in education, and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me.’” She then added: “And I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby, and I stayed home for a couple of years.” Warren never mentioned anything about being fired.
On Monday, the Washington Free Beacon published notes from county school board meetings showing that Warren’s contract had been renewed unanimously for a second year, but that she chose to resign — a decision the board accepted “with regret.”
Late Monday evening, CBS News published a story in which Warren stuck to her story about being let go for being pregnant, saying she had only opened up more fully about her life when entering politics.
The mainstream news network also found contemporaneous newspaper accounts from 1971 that reported Warren had left her job voluntarily.
In her fundraising email, Warren cited one of two teachers quoted in the CBS News story, who said: “The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer. But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”
She left out that the teachers also told CBS News that they “don’t remember anyone being explicitly fired due to pregnancy during their time at the school.”
Warren, who raised nearly $25 million in the third quarter, trailing only Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) among Democratic presidential candidates, has used this fundraising tactic before.
In November 2017, she raised cash off President Donald Trump calling her “Pocahontas,” referring to her false claims of Native American ancestry.
By 2019, she had to apologize.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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