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Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has repeatedly shared an anecdote about her younger self crying out for "Fweedom!" — which has led this week to accusations of plagiarism.
"My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to me and asked, 'Kamala, what's wrong? What do you want?' And I wailed back, 'Fweedom,'" Harris wrote in her 2010 book "Smart on Crime."
Harris also detailed her younger self demanding "Fweedom!" in her 2019 book "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey."
Her story, which was documented as early as 2004 in an interview with W Magazine, was also retold multiple times on camera.
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In June, in the early weeks of the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd, Harris told her "Fweedom" anecdote during an appearance on NBC's "The Tonight Show."
"Oh c'mon!" host Jimmy Fallon exclaimed with laughter.
"It was a much cuter story when she would tell it, but that's the story she told," Harris responded, referring to her mother.
In January 2019, during Harris' own presidential campaign, she sat down with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart during her "Truths We Hold" book tour and told the story in front of an audience, which laughed and clapped along with it.
"I'm so glad you told that story on your own because I was gonna ask you because I wanted to hear you say 'Fweedom,'" Capehart grinned.
"Oh yeah," Harris chuckled.
Harris was accused on Monday of appropriating the anecdote from civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. after it resurfaced in an interview published by Elle magazine back in October.
"Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young," writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. "She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller ... and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset."
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"My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing," Harris told the magazine. "And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’"
Twitter users @EngelsFreddie and Andray Domise, a contributing editor of the Canadian publication Maclean's, noted that Harris' story resembled one told by King in a 1965 interview published in Playboy.
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"I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a White policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother," King said at the time. "'What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom.' She couldn't even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me."
Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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