Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) responded to criticism of her latest suspect claim — that she was fired from her job as a schoolteacher because she was “visibly pregnant” — in an interview with CBS, doubling down even in the face of new evidence that she resigned her position.
Warren told CBS that, “All I know is I was 22 years old, I was 6 months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job.”
The claim has become central to Warren’s strategy for reaching out to female voters, and she’s mentioned that she was “showed the door” for becoming pregnant with her first child several times over the last week. She says the incident dashed her dreams of becoming a public school teacher and forced her into a life of public service.
There are problems with Warren’s account, however. In an interview in 2007, she told an audience at the University of California Berkeley that she was forced to resign her position as a special education teacher because she’d only obtained an “emergency certificate” to teach and chose not to complete the additional graduate courses necessary to fulfill the requirements of the job.
“I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities,” she said. “I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency certificate,’ it was called,” Warren said in 2007. “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.’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”
In a statement subsequent to her interview, she explained that she’d lied about her fate in 2007 because she didn’t feel comfortable opening up about discrimination at the time. Now that it’s 2019, her audiences are “woke” enough to accept the real explanation for why she abandoned being a public schoolteacher for a lucrative job as a law professor, then author, then house-flipper, then highly paid public servant.
Her net worth is now, reportedly, well over $10 million, so the incident didn’t exactly ruin her life.
“After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them. I wrote about it in my book when I became a U.S. Senator,” Warren’s campaign said.
She doubled down again in a series of Tweets Tuesday morning.
When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize. 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.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019
This was 1971, years before Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination—but we know it still happens in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019
She also claims she was initially offered the job when she wasn’t showing and the offer was revoked when she was around six months pregnant and supervisors at her school could tell she was having a baby.
“In April of that year, my contract was renewed to teach again for the next year,” Warren said, adding that she was trying to hide her pregnancy and hadn’t mentioned it to anyone at work. “I was pregnant, but nobody knew it. And then a couple of months later when I was six months pregnant and it was pretty obvious, the principal called me in, wished me luck, and said he was going to hire someone else for the job.”
CBS wasn’t able to verify Warren’s account of her dismissal, but did say that they contacted other women employed by Warren’s school district at roughly the same time, and while they couldn’t corroborate Warren’s exact story, there is evidence of a “cultural” expectation that women wouldn’t return to work once they started a family.
“Interviews with retired teachers who worked for the Riverdale Board of Education at the same time as Warren suggest that while they do not remember Warren or the circumstances of her leaving the school, the workplace culture at the time may have left Warren with no option but to move on when her pregnancy became apparent,” CBS reported.
There’s plenty of evidence, however, that Warren is at least embellishing the truth, something she’s developed a habit of doing on the campaign trail. And it isn’t just conservative outlets reporting Warren’s evolving description of her incident of discrimination. The far-left publication, Jacobin, was the first to notice Warren’s weird story, according to Hot Air.
And then there’s the Washington Free Beacon, which obtained a record of minutes from a school board meeting where members of the board noted that Warren was offered a contract extension only to turn it down.
Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”
Social justice warriors have rushed to Warren’s defense, calling her story, essentially, “fake but accurate,” since women have long struggled with this exact form of discrimination, even if Warren may not have.