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Gloria Allred warned President Donald Trump to keep his hands off Senator Elizabeth Warren while speaking at a press conference for the National Organization for Women (NOW) on Friday afternoon.
Allred, who was presented with NOW’s Lifetime Achievement Award, went after the president for his controversial comments during a rally in Montana on Thursday, when he mocked the #MeToo movement and repeatedly attacked the Massachusetts Senator about her heritage.
“Mr. Trump, #MeToo is alive and well. Keep your hands off Elizabeth Warren and every mother and her daughter,” the women’s rights attorney said at the end of her acceptance speech. Trump has specifically targeted Warren in speeches, derisively nicknaming the senator “Pocahontas” after she has claimed that she is part Native American.
On Thursday, Trump doubled down on these comments, saying, “I want to apologize. Pocahontas, I apologize to you. I apologize to you. To you, I apologize,” Trump said during his rally, but refused to issue an apology to Warren for his nickname. “To the fake Pocahontas, I won’t apologize.”
Trump also made a mockery of the #MeToo movement while suggesting Warren take an ancestry test to prove that she is, in fact, Native American. “We will take that little kit, but we have to do it gently because we’re in the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very gentle, and we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it,” he said, also adding that he would offer $1 million to her favorite charity if she took the test and it “shows you are an Indian.”
Warren responded on Twitter, advising Trump: “While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order. Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you’re destroying.” Warren was referring to the Health and Human Services Department’s announcement that it will use DNA to confirm parent-child links.
Earlier in her speech, Allred addressed the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade after the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Trump has repeatedly promised he will appoint a Supreme Court justice who will overturn the landmark 1973 decision.
“It is very personal to me because … I was one of the millions of women who was forced to have an unsafe abortion,” Allred said. She described a gruesome experience, saying that she “almost bled to death in a bathtub and had to be taken to the hospital.” Allred said she also endured a 106 degree fever and “had to be packed in ice,” almost facing death.
Allred has previously recounted her illegal pre-1973 abortion in the 2018 Netflix documentary Seeing Allred.
“We’re going to have to fight for our rights, plantation by plantation. State by state. And who’s going to be the most vulnerable? It’s women,” Allred said. The attorney also encouraged women to make their voices heard by having a “Rosa Parks moment every day.”
“Speak up, fight back and seek positive change. Others will follow your lead and, ultimately, you will come out a leader,” Allred said, then urging the audience to repeatedly recite: “Resist. Insist. Persist. Elect.”
“Speak truth to power, fight back and win,” she concluded.
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