The Heidi Heitkamp campaign mistakenly named them as survivors of abuse. Now, they want answers.

The Heitkamp campaign, which sought to attack Cramer for suggesting that "hard people" did not identify with the national conversation about sexual assault and the treatment of women, issued an open letter criticizing comments and signed by 127 women. Shortly after the publication of the letter, the women began to come forward and say that they had been included without their permission or were not survivors of "domestic violence, sexual assault or rape", such as indicated in the letter.

"I do not think anyone is perfect in the world and sometimes when you're on a big stage, you can make big mistakes," she said on Tuesday. "And I think our campaign has made a big mistake and we need to own and fix it."

Although the senator said the responsibility was hers, the campaign member who was writing the open letter is no longer part of the campaign, said Julia Krieger, spokesperson for the re-election bid. Krieger did not provide the name of the staff member and did not specify when he had been fired or resigned.

Beck, a mother of a child who is getting married next month, was waiting to hear from Heitkamp before using the misstep of the election campaign to deliver a ruling to the senator.

The two men spoke Tuesday afternoon, in what Beck described as a "brief, sweet and relevant conversation".

"She apologized, but she did not get an answer for me," Beck said. "I feel like she has plenty of time to say something or give me something."

As painful as it was for Heitkamp and the Democrats, who hoped that his unique brand would allow him to win another victory in a deep red state, it was even more painful for the women unveiled in the advertisement or identified wrongly as survivors.

Some hesitate to speak, not wanting their name to continue to be "drugged" by the media.

"I am not even a survivor and my name has been included in the advertisement," said a woman who requested anonymity. "I had family and friends who called me all concerned – it was humiliating."

Others, however, are ready to fight.

A group of a dozen women – led by Shylah Forde, Megan Stoltz and Alexandria Delzer, three of the poorly identified women – told CNN late Tuesday that they were looking for "a lawyer who will take our case" because the announcement "interfered with, or downright ruined, our lives".

They wrote: "Victims of aggression who had taken care to avoid the subject were suddenly bombarded by questions asking them to explain to their loved ones why their name was on this list. who have never been assaulted have spent the day reassuring their loved ones security. "

"Our privacy was violated that day and we deserve to be closed," they added.

What women want more than anything, they say, are answers.

According to more than a dozen interviews with women affected by this controversy, it would seem more and more that a person pulls names from a publication on Facebook and adds them to the letter. open to Cramer without his consent.

Delzer has launched a call for action on her Facebook page, asking women to be part of a "letter being broadcast among survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and rape responding to Cramer's comments ".

"We are looking for women who are ready to sign their name (or initials) and to register their hometown of North Dakota to be included in the letter / announcement," reads the message, which ends with informing readers that another woman would validate all the signatures that ended up on the open letter.

Below, Delzer tagged 12 other women in a comment and 12 more in a later comment. The 24 women all appeared in the open letter to Cramer, most in the exact same order as in Delzer's comments.

"I'm a little puzzled about how all this happened after I tagged my friends in a message," Delzer told CNN. "All I did was share the message on Facebook and tagged some of my friends on Facebook and nobody, nobody will tell me who, took the names that I'm I tagged them and placed them in the letter. "

She added, "I feel now that my name is dragged in the mud, I just do not know how it worked out."

Delzer also spoke to Heitkamp on Tuesday. "She seemed sincere enough to apologize," Delzer said, but did not give him an answer.

She added, discouraged: "I only shared a message on Facebook".

This led these women to believe that someone who remains nameless took the names posted by Delzer and added them to the letter without error and in some cases without asking for their approval.

Campaign spokesman Krieger said Heitkamp and the campaign had acknowledged that "this process is clearly flawed".

"We have to help the women who are wrongly included in the advertisement to find out what's wrong and we are still working to bring it together internally to make sure it does not happen again," she added, but she refused. to say if that was what had happened.

Lexi Zhorela, a self-identifying 24-year-old Bismarck liberal, was one of Delzer's women.

"I'm more than furious," she said, adding that seeing her name on a public list was "humiliating".

Zhorela has planned to vote for Heitkamp in November. "It has changed," she concluded.