(NEW YORK) — Dolores Huerta, the iconic civil rights leader and co-founder of the United Farm Workers, said she decided to speak out to support other women who have come forward after a New York Times report revealed accusations of sexual assault against the late labor leader Cesar Chávez.
“And to think that somebody that we looked at as our hero and our leader — you know, it’s pretty horrible,” Huerta said in a network exclusive with John Quiñones.
According to the Times, the late farmworker organizer, who became a national civil rights icon, used his position of power to exploit some of the women and minors who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification.
Chavez died in 1993 at age 66.
On Wednesday, Huerta said in a statement that she was “manipulated and pressured into having sex” with Chávez. Huerta, 95, stated she had two separate sexual encounters with Chávez in the 1960s — one in which she said she was pressured to have sex with him and the other in which she said she was forced against her will.
“Your first name, Dolores, in English translates into pain or aching. Have you been suffering in silence, holding these secrets all these decades?” asked Quiñones.
“It was very hard, it was very hard to keep this. But, you know, I think I am building on the courage of these young women — that they had the courage to come out and say what happened to them. And God knows what they’ve suffered,” Huerta said. “It was time.”
According to the Times, one of the women who spoke out alleged she was 12 years old when Chávez first touched her inappropriately and 15 when he raped her in California. Another woman alleged she was summoned for sexual encounters with Chávez dozens of times over a four-year period, starting when she was 13 and he was 45.
Huerta said Chávez “had an evil side to him.”
“Cesar spoke about and practiced the nonviolent movement,” Huerta said. “Well, what could be more violent than that?”
Huerta says both encounters she had with Chávez led to pregnancies that she kept secret, later arranging for the children to be raised by other families.
“I thought that abortion was a sin,” Huerta told Quiñones. “I have since changed my mind on those issues because I now realize that women have to have a right to abortion. And by the way, abortion was also illegal at that time.”
She told ABC News one of the children was raised by her brother and the other was raised by a family friend.
When asked about Chavez’s legacy amid the allegations, Huerta said she hopes that “his legacy would live on in the things that were accomplished.”
Huerta’s career as an activist began in 1955 when she joined the Community Service Organization, where she met Chavez. Together, they founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later became the UFW.
Huerta played a pivotal role in the Delano grape strike of 1965 and led the subsequent national boycott of table grapes, which successfully pressured growers to improve wages and working conditions.
In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Huerta said she remains committed to her work, focusing on current threats to labor rights and the treatment of immigrants in detention centers.
“My intention is just to do the work, make lives better for women, make lives better for working people,” Huerta said. “We know that the job isn’t finished yet.”
“At my age, 96, as long as God gives me strength and the little energy that I have left, I want to just continue doing the work to make life better for women, for children, and of course, for farmworkers and workers in general,” she added.
“I know we have a long fight ahead of us, even in our country right now, because so many of the gains that have been won over the years are being taken away from us.”
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