Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who made headlines last week when she said women must vote for Hillary Clinton or they would go to a “special place in hell,” said Friday that her controversial comment was “undiplomatic.”
Albright, 78, had chastised women who supported Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, when she told a New Hampshire audience last week that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
The Clinton surrogate came close to offering an apology in a New York Times op-ed posted Friday afternoon titled “Madeleine Albright: My Undiplomatic Moment,” in which she reiterated her belief that women must help other women but said it “was the wrong time to use that line.”
“I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender,” Albright wrote. “But I understand that I came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences.”
“I have spent much of my career as a diplomat. It is an occupation in which words and context matter a great deal. So one might assume I know better than to tell a large number of women to go to hell,” she wrote.