During the tenth Democratic primary debate on Tuesday (Feb. 25), Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former mayor and current billionaire Michael Bloomberg were caught in the second back-and-forth they’ve had during a national debate. This time, Warren detailed her account of losing her teaching job when she was 21 years old because she was pregnant — and what that experience had to do with Bloomberg’s alleged history as a boss.
“At least I didn’t have a boss who said to me ‘kill it’ the way that Mayor Bloomberg alleged to have said to one of his pregnant employees,” Warren said, to booing in the audience. Bloomberg immediately denied the accusation, but when moderator Gayle King asked what evidence Warren had, she answered: “Her words.”
Warren was referring to a case in which one of Bloomberg’s former saleswomen sued him and his company for workplace discrimination after she says Bloomberg told her to abort her pregnancy. Bloomberg denied the allegation at the time and again on stage on Tuesday, and he reached a confidential settlement with the saleswoman, according to The Washington Post. The Post also interviewed David Zielenziger, a former Bloomberg employee who said he witnessed the conversation and that it was “outrageous.”
“I remember she had been telling some of her girlfriends that she was pregnant,” Zielenziger told the Post. “And Mike came out and I remember he said, ‘Are you going to kill it?’ And that stopped everything. And I couldn’t believe it.”
This isn’t the first time Warren and Bloomberg have gone toe-to-toe: Earlier in the debate, she called him out for giving funding to Republican candidates in past elections.
“Who funded Lindsey Graham’s campaign for re-election last time? It was Mayor Bloomberg. And that’s not the only right-wing Senator that Mayor Bloomberg has funded,” Warren said. “In 2016, he dumped $12 million into Pennsylvania’s senate race to help re-elect an anti-choice right-wing Republican senator and I just want to say, the woman challenger was terrific; she lost by a single point. In 2012, he scooped in to try to defend another Republican senator against a woman challenger. It didn’t work, but he tried hard.”
She was that challenger.
