Nearly eight years ago, feeling that she had been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment.
Then she learned the lengths to which Trump’s attorneys would go to fight back — and their unwillingness to stop.
Soon after, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It obtained a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and nearly drove her into bankruptcy.
She found it humiliating when the campaign attorneys branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a court. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s spiritual practices.
The judgment was later thrown out by a court, but her legal battle continues.
The process has been “unbearable,” Denson said, describing the relentless stress she felt from Trump campaign attorneys. “This had become my life. I had no income and had this lien against me. It crippled my ability to work.”
The fitting sources deployed to take a look at out to crush Denson’s case are no longer habitual. On the least 4 ladies of coloration fervent on the 2016 operation were embroiled in appropriate fights with the campaign over situation of job harassment, discrimination or violations of nondisclosure agreements. They’ve been subjected to scorched-earth ways. For years, the Trump campaign has persevered, despite shedding continuously, in no longer decrease than some instances after it used to be definite that its efforts had broken the ladies.
Trump was regularly briefed on the women’s cases, according to two people familiar with the matters. In one instance, he wanted to escalate the dispute by filing a federal defamation lawsuit against the former employee, but his lawyers persuaded him it was best handled through confidential arbitration. Campaign attorneys urged him to resolve the ongoing ‘legacy proceedings’ from 2016 before the 2020 election, but he declined.
Now as Trump engages in a single other presidential tear, a mediate’s narrate in a form of instances might also force into public glimpse the unique necessary elements about staffers who lodged identical accusations. A federal Justice of the Peace mediate has ordered the campaign to form by Would possibly perhaps well also honest 31 a list of all discrimination and harassment complaints made for the length of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, allegations that the campaign in the origin tried to relieve confidential by rigorously enforced NDAs. Final year, a federal mediate freed 422 staff of the 2016 campaign from confidentiality agreements in a class-action lawsuit brought by Denson, a prime crack in the campaign’s device.
As the media has reported, Trump is a well-known bully. He has belittled and sought to dominate political opponents such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former allies such as Bill Barr, who was his attorney general. Trump and his surrogates have appeared to take pleasure in hounding or humiliating women who have verbally crossed him, including media and Hollywood figures and a long list of accusers who have complained over the years about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct. (He has denied all of the allegations.)
But ProPublica learned that Trump’s campaign used identical bullying tactics against its own workers. These fights were waged out of the public eye against women with few resources to stand up to the campaign’s battery of attorneys, paid from a seemingly bottomless trove of campaign money.
The campaign is “still litigating these ridiculous cases that should have been settled,” said campaign finance expert Brett Kappel of Harmon Curran, who has been tracking Trump’s civil and criminal cases. Trump’s strategy is a familiar one he’s used in other proceedings: “Draw it out and make it as painful and expensive as possible for the opponent, and chances are they’ll give up,” he said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Spokesperson Steven Cheung in an emailed statement said one of the cases filed by a former campaign employee was “an absurd and untrue story.”
Supporters are giving him money earned with “blood, sweat and tears,” Denson said. “And it is being used to terrorize members.”
As is being revealed now in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump’s chaotic 2016 campaign was governed by one overriding public relations strategy: suppress any hint of scandal that could be unflattering or damaging to the candidate.
Trump’s campaign employed a trio of tools, largely borrowed from the Trump Organization, to achieve that. Allegations were met with swift denials. Staff were pressured into silence by stringent NDAs that imposed a lifetime ban on disparaging Trump, his extended family, or any of his businesses. And the campaign’s attorneys brought in a phalanx of Trump-savvy outside lawyers ready to act decisively.
How much the campaign has spent on such efforts is unclear, but it is likely in the millions, according to spending reviews. Trump’s expenses for all his various legal challenges — workplace harassment claims are not broken out — have exceeded $100 million.
Trump’s use of donor funds to fight legal actions against the campaign is permissible, but experts believe he has pushed the limits of regulations that prohibit using campaign contributions for personal matters unrelated to running for office.
The campaign confronted its first-known discrimination complaint in January 2016 when Iowa field organizer Elizabeth Davidson filed a case with a state civil rights agency claiming she had been underpaid because she was a woman. The regulations pupil had been fired and accused of violating her NDA by making “disparaging feedback” to the press, in accordance with the complaint. Davidson dropped her case without clarification in 2018. She didn’t return mobile phone calls.
The Trump campaign brought out heavy artillery to try to discredit another female employee who filed a federal lawsuit in February 2019. Alva Johnson, a field operations director from Alabama, alleged pay disparities and a hostile work environment in 2016 but her most explosive allegation was that Trump engaged in “sexually predatory conduct” by kissing her without permission during a Florida campaign event.
To address her case, the campaign hired lawyer Charles Harder, best known for winning a privacy case in 2016 that financially destroyed the gossip website Gawker. Harder’s firm was paid $4.3 million for legal work on a number of campaign matters between 2018 and 2021, according to spending reports. Trump was then in the White House, and spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Johnson’s accusation “absurd.”
Morey produced a video filmed by an unnamed supporter. It showed Trump kissing Johnson on the mouth as he approached her for the first time in a reception line. Morey argued the video showed the kiss was not forced; Johnson’s attorneys argued it proved the kiss was accurate and unwelcome.
A Trump-appointed judge threw out Johnson’s case in 2019, calling the kissing allegation a political assault, and gave her leave to refile a complaint focused solely on alleged pay disparities. She mentioned not too long ago in an interview she chose not to do so, largely because she was unnerved for herself and her family as Trump supporters rallied to the president’s defense.
“I surely heard about every conceivable way I might also die,” she said. “We lived in a cul-de-sac, and as well they’d honestly drive around with their Trump flags.”
Morey subpoenaed Johnson’s bank statements, wide news media contacts and communications with possible employers. At one point, Johnson mentioned, Morey offered to withdraw the complaint if she would apologize to Trump and drop the NDA in place. She refused. At another point, Trump wanted to countersue her for defamation, nonetheless his attorneys talked him out of it, according to two members.
In response to questions, More sturdy mentioned his appropriate ways were “100% permissible discovery in an employment case” and her attorneys didn’t object. “It’s known as litigation, and it’s allotment of the accurate route of,” he mentioned.
Johnson’s arbitration case continued long after Morey’s firm withdrew. The campaign brought in new outside attorneys, but by then, judges in Denson’s New York case had found the NDA invalid and other courts appeared likely to follow. If Johnson won, Trump’s NDA stated the losing party must pay legal fees.
In August 2022, the arbitrator found Johnson’s NDA unenforceable and ordered the campaign to pay her attorneys $303,285. She said she personally received no money but “obtained the ability to speak out.”
In a statement, Cheung, the spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 campaign, called Johnson’s account “an absurd and untrue anecdote that has previously been debunked and contradicted by multiple, highly credible eyewitness accounts.”
The campaign also relied on More sturdy in an NDA case it brought against former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black former contestant on “The Apprentice” who wrote a 2018 tell-all book describing Trump as a racist. Trump smeared her on Twitter as a “low life.” More sturdy said he withdrew from the case before its conclusion.
Newman had signed an NDA in 2016 when she joined the campaign, and its attorneys demanded $1.5 million for violating the secrecy agreement. The case dragged on until 2021, when an arbitration mediator ruled in Newman’s favor and found Trump’s NDA too vague to enforce. He ordered the campaign to pay $1.3 million to Newman’s attorneys. “The bully has met his match,” Newman declared at the time. She could not be reached for comment.
A discrimination case pending in a New York court, however, might also bring the culture of Trump’s past campaigns and their suppression efforts into the light.
Arlene “AJ” Delgado sued the 2016 campaign and three senior officers for discrimination after she became pregnant by her supervisor, Jason Miller, then the campaign’s chief spokesperson.
Trump had called Delgado a rising star when she went on the campaign trail as one of his Hispanic surrogates, and she expected an administration job. But she claimed that as soon as she confronted Miller about her pregnancy, he told her Trump could not afford to have her “waddling all through the White House pregnant.” Other senior officers shut her out of work discussions until her transition job ended with Trump’s inauguration, she claimed.
Ten days after Delgado delivered her baby, the Trump campaign filed a $1.5 million claim against her for NDA violations. Delgado’s main offense, according to the campaign, was a series of angry tweets about Miller and Trump’s decision to promote him to White House communications director. The lawyer on the case, Lawrence Rosen, who left LaRocca Hornik Rosen & Greenberg, as it was then known, late last year, and his former partners did not return calls or emails.
Miller did not reply to repeated attempts to seek comment.
The firm, now named LaRocca, Hornik, Greenberg, Kittredge, Carlin & McPartland, leases space in a Trump-owned office building, and it has long been a favored vendor for the Trump campaign. It has been paid no less than $2.8 million since 2016 by the Trump campaign and its affiliated PAC, Make America Great Again, according to campaign records. Rosen was described on the firm’s website as a “bulldog” litigator, and he recently surfaced in testimony from Trump fixer Michael Cohen as a lawyer involved in his effort to silence Daniels, a porn star.
Delgado, a Harvard Law School graduate, claims in the lawsuit filed in December 2019 that the campaign deprived her of a job and harmed her other employment opportunities. Squaring off against campaign attorneys, she serves as her own lawyer and has raised money for legal fees, including taking depositions from former senior White House officials, through GoFundMe.
Delgado recently accused the campaign of withholding information about its handling of harassment and discrimination cases. A LaRocca associate said in a court filing that the campaign has disclosed all of the information it has regarding women’s complaints.
The mediate ordered the campaign to form a paunchy list of instances by Would possibly perhaps well also honest 31. (It’s unclear whether there are any instances which procure no longer emerged but into public glimpse.)
The LaRocca firm withdrew from the case without delay, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the campaign, after five years pursuing Delgado in court.
As for former 2016 campaign staffer Denson, now an actress who hosts a podcast, she continues to pursue her discrimination and retaliation lawsuit, saying she wants her persistence to inspire others.
The federal judge’s decision in October 2023 to void NDAs for all 2016 staff, contractors and volunteers was a blow to the campaign. The campaign agreed to pay $450,000 to Denson’s attorneys and to not pursue staff for NDA violations.
Denson said her concerns began when she joined the campaign’s communications division as a national phone bank administrator, one of a dozen staff who reported to director Camilo Sandoval. She had no experience and believed she and another woman, a model, were hired solely because of their appearance.
She claimed that Sandoval, who later worked in several high-ranking Trump administration jobs, made inappropriate comments and assigned end-of-day tasks to keep her late. In one private meeting, she said, he reclined on a couch. In a deposition, Sandoval denied many of Denson’s allegations. He did not respond to calls or email.
Denson’s work on a Spanish-language project caught the attention of Steve Bannon, then the campaign’s CEO, who moved her to work on Hispanic outreach and raised her pay by $3,000 a month, her complaint stated. Sandoval reacted angrily to the transfer and scolded her immediate supervisor for letting his “sheep get away.” He told her, “I hired you and I can also fire you,” she alleged.
Denson introduced emails Sandoval despatched to senior officers describing her as a security likelihood who desires to be reported to the police and the Secret Provider. He advised she used to be stealing documents and might perhaps procure had a position in mailing Trump’s 1995 interior most tax return to a reporter at The Original York Conditionscourt info ticket. She claimed he hacked into her interior most laptop while she used to be traveling. In a deposition, he denied having access to her interior most info.
In light of Bannon’s encouraging emails about her performance, Denson believed she might be hired for Trump’s transition. But documents showed the campaign’s human resources director telling others, “Jessica is never to be hired onto the transition, inaugural team, or brought to DC!” An email from Sandoval to senior official Stephen Miller read, “This bitch is out of control.”
She filed a lawsuit in New York state court in November 2017 claiming emotional distress on account of “pervasive slander,” discrimination and harassment. A month later, Rosen pounced. On Christmas Eve, Denson received papers demanding that she face arbitration for violating her NDA by filing the lawsuit. The campaign sought $1.5 million in damages.
Denson declined to go to arbitration, arguing that her right to a safe workplace was unrelated to the NDA, and the campaign obtained the judgment for attorney fees by default. Rosen had her bank account frozen and went after $1,200 she had raised by GoFundMe.
“Here is how merciless and scorched-earth they were,” she said in a recent interview.
Denson said in her deposition that Trump campaign attorneys grilled her aggressively about her whereabouts. “Their obsession with my whereabouts was very unsettling,” she said. “The fear has lived with me ever since.”
She felt further traumatized when the campaign demanded to search for psychological health and scientific information. She was upset when they told her during her deposition that her emotional harm was not valid.
Denson’s case followed a circuitous course, and originally she served as her own lawyer because she had no money to pay legal fees. She remembered crying inconsolably late one evening, fearing her case was hopeless, then waking up to learn a judge had sided with her and had thrown out the judgment in the campaign’s favor as unfair.
In March 2021, a federal judge declared her individual NDA invalid under New York state contract law and said the campaign had used NDAs many times to “suppress free speech.” Denson and her legal team moved forward to extend her victory to all 2016 staffers.
Legal experts believe the class-action victory established a precedent that could deter future campaigns from attempting to quash staffers’ free-speech rights.
Denson and other women fighting the campaign were struck by Trump’s repeated assertions in his private instances that his right to speak freely has been violated.
“I came to the campaign as someone who cared deeply about human rights, the First Amendment, and individual liberty; I believed I was working on a campaign that supported these values,” Denson said. “Then I saw the opposite of what this country stands for, going after perceived critics and attempting to silence them.”
