The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security told the world that after the Lahaina fire, one in six female survivors were forced to engage in sexual acts in exchange for basic needs like food and housing.

And the Lahaina people were like, “What the hell is she talking about?”

Before Kristi Noem, the Insta-Glam puppy-shooting Republican, spat out that spurious statistic as though it was God’s truth, Hawaiʻi’s own flame thrower Khara Jabola-Carolus made a similar statement based on the same report:

“The fact that in the richest country in the world women had to resort to any means necessary to meet basic human needs and survive a fire, is absolutely a critique of the entire American system – and the problem with having that system forced onto Hawaii,” Jabola-Carolus, a co-author of the report called “Equality in Flames: The Impact of the Lahaina Wildfire on Gender Equality and Filipino Women in Hawaii,” told The Guardian, the only media outlet that bit on the story when the report was released in May.

And the Lahaina people were like, “What the hell is she talking about?”

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Now, Jabola-Carolus is accusing Noem of twisting her already twisted takeaway from the study.

What the hell indeed.

The study both Noem and Jabola-Carolus were referring to was based on interviews with 70 Filipino women in Lahaina after the fire.

It was conducted by Tagnawa, a group that came into existence after the Lahaina fires, which is described on its website as “a feminist organization rooted in the Filipino values of communal care, reciprocity, shared responsibility, and kapwa (kindred).”

The report states:

“Sexual conduct in exchange for basic necessities post-disaster was reported by 16% of female Filipino fire survivors. These women engaged in a sexual relationship or sex in order to have a place to stay, food, or money after the Lahaina fire, i.e., for something of value. The sexual conduct included kissing, hugging, touching, and intercourse with a landlord, an employer, family members, friends and acquaintances.”

So, if you read into the details, “sexual conduct” could be anything from the worst possible abusive situation to the very benign, “Mahalo Uncle for letting us move into your guest house” followed by a hug.

This kind of ambiguity and imprecision is dangerous and open to manipulation. The reports were not based on calls to 911 or arrests or court cases or applications for TROs. We don’t know exactly what the statistic means. We’re left to imagine.

In contrast, a larger study conducted by the same organization at the same time interviewed a total of 757 Filipino fire survivors in Lahaina. Among that study’s conclusions was the finding that 97.8% of respondents reported no experiences of sexual or physical violence and said they felt safe.

Neither Noem nor Jabola-Carolus quoted that statistic.

Furthering Political Agendas

Jabola-Carolus wanted to be the one using the study’s most salacious findings for her own strange quest to be the most aggrieved woman in the Pacific. What a burn for a Republican strongwoman to take the same info and use it for her own maleficent machinations.

Of course, we can all agree that even one person who experienced sexual or physical violence is too many, and that the survivors of the Lahaina fire were, and in some cases still are, very vulnerable.

But truly, what the hell are these people who aren’t from Lahaina talking about? How dare they use Lahaina’s situation to further their political agendas and national profiles?

Noem was like a kid who didn’t read far into the chapter when she posted this on X:

“These women — our fellow American citizens — were so desperate for food that they had to resort to such extreme measures just to feed themselves in our own country. While American citizens from Hawaii to North Carolina suffered, Biden and Mayorkas used FEMA as a piggy bank, spending hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to housing illegal aliens. This will never happen again under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem.”

Noem clearly didn’t get that many of the women surveyed were immigrants from the Philippines, which would have set off alarms in her MAGA-brain. If she had actually read the study, she might have been demanding names and addresses, and sending out the ICE squads.

Meanwhile, the people who survived the fire in Lahaina are being victimized again by those who use their plight to gain attention in the no-holds-barred bloodsport that we still quaintly call “politics.” They so easily mischaracterize the situation of real women who survived the fire. They so easily make men look like predators.

That is not to say that nothing bad could have happened in the aftermath of the fires, just that the survey was an imprecise measurement, and the conclusions drawn by both these two political provocateurs from opposite teams are highly suspect. It’s more noise in a world overrun with the cacophony of obfuscation and mendacity.