State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, delivered a ferocious defense Tuesday night of her life story and her parenting of her two daughters, declaring that Attorney General Greg Abbott has “picked a fight with the wrong Texas gal.”
“I won’t let anyone take my family’s truth away from me,” said Davis, speaking even as President Obama was delivering his State of the Union speech. It was the most passionate and powerful defense of the now-contested personal narrative that has been central to her message as a candidate for governor.
“Greg Abbott can sink as low as he wants, but I won’t let him drag me down with him. He can run a campaign about my past; I’m going to run one that’s about your future,” Davis told the Travis County Democratic Party’s Johnson-Bentsen-Richards dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel. “But there’s one thing I have to say before I leave Greg Abbott and his allies to play in the gutter once and for all. And I want to say it right here, right now, with Texas listening – because I want to make sure our opponents can hear it loud and clear. You can attack my record. You can challenge my ideas. You can play holier-than-thou with my life story. But I draw the line when it comes to lying about my family.”
It has been ten days since a story in the Dallas Morning News, challenged details of her biography, and led to a frenzy of reporting and commentary about Davis, whose candidacy has drawn great national interest. Davis has blamed the Abbott campaign for generating the negative stories, though both the Abbott campaign and Wayne Slater, who wrote the original story in the Dallas paper, said he never talked to the Abbott campaign before publishing his story.
Davis is particularly incensed by reports that she had “abandoned” her daughters. Amber and Dru, by attending Harvard Law School, or that she had lost custody of her daughters after her divorce from her second husband.
Earlier in the day, both daughters issued separate open letters describing what a wonderful mother Davis is and has always been, in the face of what they characterized as a wave of malicious innuendo.
Amber Davis, struggling against tears, introduced her mother Tuesday night, as “my best friend, my role model and, make no mistake about it, the best mother in the world.”
Among the details Davis acknowledges getting wrong in the past was describing herself as a single mother at 19, when her divorce wasn’t finalized until she was 21.
But, she said Tuesday, “Most women think about the moment when they become the sole caregiver of their child as the time when their marriage ends. My divorce was official on a piece of paper when I was 21 - but in reality my marriage ended when I was 19, and I became Amber’s sole caregiver – and remained so for four years.”
And, she said, “I pursued my education not instead of being a good mother, but because being a good mother required that I build a better life for my family – and a better education made that possible for me and for Amber.”
“And for those who have mangled the story of my life – either carelessly or purposely – know this,” said Davis. “I never gave up custody of my children. I never lost custody of my children. And to say otherwise is an absolute lie.”
“Make no mistake,” Davis said, “they were my children the day they were born, they are my children today and they will be my children forever. They have been at the center of my life since the moment that theirs began and they will be at the center of my life until the moment that it ends.”
Davis also spoke warmly of the role her second husband, Jeff Davis, played in her success.
“My former husband Jeff was generous and supportive when it came to my education,” she said.
The dinner, emceed by Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, her wingman in the abortion filibuster last June that catapulted her into the national limelight and presaged her candidacy for governor, was closed to the press, but it was live-streamed by the Texas Tribune.
Davis was preceded to the podium by Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, who also played a critical role back in June in rousing the crowd in the Senate gallery that enabled the filibuster to succeed and who will be the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, and Cecile Richards, who was the honoree at the dinner.
Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was an iconic presence at the Capitol throughout the filibuster. Apart from her role as a national spokeswoman for abortion rights, she is the daughter of the late Ann Richards, the last Democratic governor of Texas. Richards said her mother had been the object of the slings and arrows of outrageous attacks in her political career, and that she would have loved to live to see the campaign that Davis is now engaged in.
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