Secretary of State Jocelyn Bensons campaign hit back at Republican attacks Friday after the state GOP demanded answers from the Democratic gubernatorial front-runner on her past work with the federally-indicted Southern Poverty Law Center.
Benson is a former volunteer and later board member of the SPLC, which was indicted Tuesday on 11 counts over accusations it fraudulently paid members of like the KKK and those tied to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC paid members of these extremist groups so it could create a “work product that reported on these activities.”
“Jocelyn Benson regularly touted her experience as a leader of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that the Department of Justice says secretly funneled money to the KKK and other hate groups they were purportedly tracking,” the Michigan Republican Party posted on its official X account on Friday.
“What did Jocelyn know, and when did she know it?”
After her 2004 graduation from college in , Benson moved to Alabama to work for the SPLC where she aided investigations of hate groups and hate crimes, according to the Harvard Law Review.
She also visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma where figures like the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., marched and were badly beaten by law enforcement.
An official with the Benson campaign confirmed she served as a volunteer researcher for the SPLC after college and later served on the Montgomery-based groups board from 2014-2018.
But when pressed on what Benson knew about the allegations in the DOJ’s indictment, her campaign pushed back on the attacks.
“Jocelyn Benson has spent her career advancing the unfinished work of the civil rights movement and expanding economic opportunity, including helping dismantle white supremacist and neo-Nazi extremist networks responsible for hate crimes across the country,” the campaign told Fox News Digital on Friday.
“And while Donald Trump is trying to use his to distract from his reckless economic policies that are driving up costs for Michiganders, Jocelyn remains focused on lower costs, raising wages, and protecting the rights and freedoms of the people in this state.”
Republicans continued to press Benson for answers.
MIGOP chairman Jim Runestad told Fox News Digital that Bensons tenure on the SPLC board coincided with the timeframe in which the DOJ alleged the group began “paying the KKK and other extremist groups.”
“Benson owes an explanation to the public in what she knows about the SPLC’s alleged criminal behavior, considering the criminal activity started around the same time Benson was named to the Board,” Runestad said.
Benson has previously described her early work at the SPLC as focused on investigating extremist groups.
In a 2025 interview with “Keen on America,” Benson recounted researching groups “claiming to be the reincarnation of [Adolf] Hitler,” saying she once sat alone in a hotel room in Spartanburg and feared those people “were going to find out who I was and come and kill me and no one would ever know about it and all the rest.”
“And that was an act of courage, small and no one saw it, but it helped me build a bravery muscle that and several other points throughout my life so that 20 years later, 25 years later, when Im standing up to the president of the United States, it wasnt the first time Ive had to take on those harrowing fights,” Benson went on in the interview.
In prior comments, an SPLC official named Penny Weaver described Benson as coming to Montgomery “straight out of college as an unpaid intern, then worked for us.”
“Benson worked as a waitress to support herself
