A former Trump campaign staffer has ended her lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of gender and race pay discrimination and forcibly kissing her during the 2016 election.
“I’m fighting against a person with unlimited resources, and repeatedly the judicial system has failed to find fault in his behavior,” Alva Johnson revealed to the Daily Beast. “That’s a huge mountain to climb.”
Johnson alleged in a February lawsuit that the president pulled her close to him and tried kissing her sometime in August 2016 in Tampa, Florida. Johnson, who is black, claimed she was compensated less than her white colleagues.
The former Trump campaign staffer claims the release of the Access Hollywood tape drove her to come forward with her own accusations months after the alleged incident.
“Once the Access Hollywood tape came out, I knew that it wasn’t just something that he did 15 years ago, that it was still his behavior, that he thinks he can violate your personal space, that he can kiss women without permission,” Johnson said.
“I think people forget that I was at work. It’s absurd to think that it was mutual,” she said of the alleged kiss.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Jung in Tampa dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, calling it a “political lawsuit.”
The White House had also dismissed Johnson’s claims as patently false.
“This accusation is absurd on its face. This never happened and is directly contradicted by multiple highly credible eye witness accounts,” said then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in February.
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