Dolores Huerta said on Wednesday that she had not previously revealed that Cesar Chavez had pressured and forced her into sex because she didn’t want to tarnish the farmworker rights movement that she had spent so long fighting for.
“I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here,” she said in her first comments since the publication of a New York Times investigation into decades of sexual abuse by the labor leader.
Ms. Huerta, who had co-founded the United Farm Workers with Mr. Chavez, said Wednesday that in the 1960s he once “manipulated and pressured” her to have sex with him and then, a second time, forced her to have sex “against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.” Both encounters led to pregnancies, which she hid. She later arranged for the children to be raised by other families.
Ms. Huerta, 95, said that she had developed “a deep relationship” with the children she gave up, but that until a few weeks ago no one knew the entire story of how they had been conceived.
“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” she said. “The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
Ms. Huerta said that she felt disturbed by the allegations that Mr. Chavez had harmed girls. She emphasized that his actions didn’t represent the values of the movement that they led together.
“My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years. There are no words strong enough to condemn those deplorable actions that he did,” she said.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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