Alva Johnson, the former campaign staffer who filed a lawsuit earlier this year accusing President Donald Trump of racial and gender discrimination as well as sexual misconduct, filed a motion Monday formally requesting that other former campaign aides, including Omarosa Manigault Newman, be permitted to join the action against the campaign alleging violations of the Equal Pay Act.
“After nearly 20 years inside the Beltway, working for two White Houses and countless political campaigns, I’ve never witnessed such egregious violations as I did during my time under the leadership of Donald Trump and Mike Pence,” Omarosa said Monday.
In the original lawsuit, Johnson, who worked for the Trump presidential campaign throughout 2016, alleged that then-candidate Trump kissed her without consent at a February 2016 campaign rally in Florida. The complaint also included allegations of pay discrimination wherein Johnson, who is black, contended that Donald J. Trump for President Inc. (DJTFP) paid her less than they paid her white and male colleagues with similar jobs, titles, and responsibilities.
Last week, the campaign and President Trump filed a motion to dismiss Johnson’s pay discrimination lawsuit, arguing that it lacked substantive evidence for the claims and included no proof illustrating that sex was the only factor separating pay to staffers.
The Monday filing by Johnson requests that the judge certify the suit as a collective action and is accompanied by a study showing that between May and December of 2016, Trump’s female campaign staffers were paid 18.2 percent less than their male counterparts. The study, which compared remunerations paid to 77 female and 151 male staffers, was compiled using publicly available pay data maintained and made available by the Federal Election Commission, and excluded statistics for a few high-paid senior leadership employees to prevent skewing the data.
The latest filing included a declaration from Omarosa (Exhibit C) in which she states that she was paid less in her role as Director of African American Outreach than by men performing similar work. The motion alleges that “this pay disparity was the result of a common scheme carried out by DJTFP’s male-dominated management and upheld via DJTFP’s centralized decision-making and policies.”
If granted, Johnson’s motion will allow her legal team to contact all of the Trump campaign’s female staffers and invite them to participate in the suit.
[photo via Drew Angerer and Getty Images]
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