Report: Women's March Leaders Made Anti-Semitic Comments to Fellow Founder

Women's March leaders Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez told the group's founders before its first march that "Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people," Tablet magazine reports, citing several sources. Similar comments were allegedly made at a leadership meeting just after the hugely successful 2017 march, when, according to Evvie Harmon, the group's former co-global coordinator, “Tamika told us that the problem was that there were five white women in the room and only three women of color, and that she didn’t trust white women. Especially white women from the South."

"At that point, I kind of tuned out because I was so used to hearing this type of talk from Tamika," Harmon was quoted as saying. "But then I noticed the energy in the room changed… I suddenly realized that Tamika and Carmen were facing [March co-founder] Vanessa [Wruble], who was sitting on a couch, and berating—but it wasn’t about her being white. It was about her being Jewish. ‘Your people this, your people that.’ I was raised in the South and the language that was used is language that I’m very used to hearing in rural South Carolina. Just instead of against black people, against Jewish people. They even said to her ‘your people hold all the wealth.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was awful,” she said. Wruble, who left the group she had led, and who had brought Mallory and Perez into it at the recommendation of former Russell Simmons political director Michael Skolnik, declined to comment on that meeting to the magazine. Both Mallory and Perez have denied that such an exchange occurred.

The report comes as the Women’s March faces questions about its finances, its relationships to local branches, and its leadership’s ties to the virulently homophobic and anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. The Women’s March told the publication that it has “no relationship with or financial ties to the Nation of Islam," adding that "we denounce anti-Semitism, and there should be no confusion about that.”