CLAIM: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley “changed” her name for political reasons.
THE FACTS: The former United Nations ambassador has long used her legal middle name, Nikki. She was given the name Nimarata Nikki Randhawa at birth. Haley is her married name.
Haley announced her run for president last week, making the former South Carolina governor the first major challenger to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination. In the days following her announcement, social media users amplified a long-circulating falsehood that Haley changed her name in order to appeal to Republican voters. Other posts claimed that Nimarata Randhawa was her “real name,” suggesting Nikki Haley was not.
But while Haley’s legal first name is indeed Nimarata, sometimes spelled as Nimrata, her middle name is Nikki — a name that her family called her growing up and that means “little one” in Punjabi, as the AP has reported. Haley’s campaign told the AP in a statement that “Amb. Haley has gone by her middle name Nikki since she was born.”
Haley herself addressed claims about her name in a 2018 tweet, writing: “Nikki is my name on my birth certificate. I married a Haley. I was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa and married Michael Haley.”
There are records showing that Haley used her middle name long before she entered politics in 2004, when she was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The Times and Democrat, a local newspaper in South Carolina, reported in...
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