Candidates battle to stand out during South Carolina debate
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A heated exchange during Tuesday's Democratic debate between Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, featured Warren reviving a story that came under scrutiny last year of how she once left her job as a special education teacher during pregnancy.
Warren claimed that when she was visibly pregnant as a young woman, she faced discrimination when her job was given to someone else. But an interview she gave more than a decade ago, along with school board records, suggests otherwise.
BLOOMBERG DENIES ACCUSATION AFTER WARREN SAYS HE ONCE TOLD EMPLOYEE TO 'KILL' UNBORN BABY
"When I was 21 years old, I got a job as a special education teacher. I loved that job," Warren said Tuesday. "And by the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. The principal wished me luck and gave my job to someone else. Pregnancy discrimination? You bet. But I was 21 years old, I didn't have any union to protect me, I didn't have any federal law on my side. So I packed up my stuff and I went home."
Warren has told versions of that story a number of times, but minutes from an April 21, 1971, meeting of the Riverdale, N.J., Board of Education obtained by the Washington Free Beacon showed that the board unanimously agreed to grant her a contract for the following year. Minutes from another meeting on June 16 of that year reflected that Warren resigned and that her resignation was "accepted with regret."
Back when she was a Harvard Law professor, Warren told a different story regarding how she came to leave that first teaching job.
"I was married at 19 and then graduated from college [at the University of Houston] after I’d married," Warren said in an interview posted to YouTube in 2008. "My first year post-graduation, I worked -- it was in a public school system but I worked with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an 'emergency certificate,' it was called.
"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,'" Warren continued. "I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, 'What am I going to do?'"
After this seemingly contradictory story and school board records surfaced in October 2019, Warren stood by what she has repeatedly said on the campaign trail.
"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," Warren told CBS News.
Her campaign also issued a statement in an attempt to explain the discrepancy between now and 2007, implying that she has learned to "open up" since becoming a public figure.
"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 said in a statement.
Warren was somewhat careful with her wording when she told the story on the debate stage. She never said she was fired, only that she was pregnant and that her job then went to someone else, although she did say that there was pregnancy discrimination.
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The Massachusetts senator used the story Tuesday night in order to then turn around to Bloomberg and say, "At least I didn't have a boss who said to me, 'Kill it,'" referring to allegations that Bloomberg made such a comment to a pregnant employee.
Bloomberg flatly denied saying it.
Fox News' Adam Shaw, Sam Dorman, and Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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