Scarlett Johansson's SNL cold open spoofs Katie Britt's SOTU response
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., attends the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing titled "Stopping the Flow of Fentanyl: Public Awareness and Legislative Solutions," in Dirksen Building on Thursday, January 11, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ
Scarlett Johansson kicked off Saturday Night Live by poking fun at U.S. Sen. Katie Britt’s State of the Union response, which has been widely panned as "weird" and used harrowing accounts of sexual abuse to attack President Biden’s border policies despite those rapes happening 20 years ago in Mexico.
"I’m not just a senator, I’m a mother, a wife, and the craziest b**ch in the Target parking lot," Johansson rips in the skit.
"What I saw was the performance of a permanent politician, but me, I’m not performing, I’m not, I’m not!" Johannson continues as she dramatically touches her forehead.
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Britt, a first-term senator from Alabama, criticized current immigration policies in the GOP’s State of the Union response, describing how she had met a woman at the U.S.-Mexico border who told of being raped thousands of times in a sex trafficking operation run by cartels, starting at age 12.
But the rapes did not happen in the U.S. or during the Biden administration. The victim has previously spoken publicly about the abuse happening in her home country of Mexico from 2004 to 2008 — not in the United States during the Biden administration. Yet, Britt used the account to chastise Biden’s action on the border.
In her cold open, Johansson, playing Britt, says "first and foremost, I’m a mom."
"And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking, and rest assured every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened," Johansson joked.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.