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An October 2020 interview with U.S. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in Elle magazine began making the rounds again in January 2021, as many, including conservatives, accused her of plagiarism. At the heart of the controversy was an anecdote she recounted that had eerie similarities to one shared by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1965 interview with Playboy magazine. Our readers wanted to know if Harris did indeed plagiarize King in her 2020 interview. The answer is complicated. While it is true that their stories are similar, her anecdote was told to her by her mother, as Harris describes it. At the beginning of the Elle interview, Harris describes something she said as a toddler: In a 1965 interview with Alex Haley, King shared the following anecdote: The way Harris described it, her now-deceased mother told her she said Fweedom. So she claims to have no direct recollection of the moment. There has been no acknowledgment from Harris regarding this plagiarism accusation, and even then there is no way to determine that her mother, who she attributes the story to, pulled this anecdote from the King interview. Harris has told this story multiple times before. The earliest reported instance was in a 2004 interview with W Magazine. In the preface to her 2009 book Smart on Crime, she recounted it in a similar manner, omitting the part where they were at a civil rights rally: My mother used to laugh when she told the story about the time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to ask me, Kamala, what's wrong? What do you want? and I wailed back, Fweedom. She also referenced it in the same way on page 8 of her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, in a 2019 interview with Jimmy Fallon, and in an interview on CSPAN, where she continued to describe it as a story recounted by her mother. Therefore, we rate this claim as a Mixture.
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