Virginia cyclist who flipped off Trump’s motorcade is suing employer for firing her
The widely shared photo captured Juli Briskman giving the middle finger to the presidential motorcade in Virginia in October 2017. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
The woman says her employer violated state employment law because the government contractor feared retaliation.
The widely shared photo captured Juli Briskman giving the middle finger to the presidential motorcade in Virginia in October 2017. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
A Virginia woman who lost her job with a government contractor after she was photographed extending her middle finger at U.S. President Donald Trump’s motorcade last year has sued her former employer for wrongful termination.
Juli Briskman directed the gesture toward a string of black SUVs that zoomed by her on her bicycle on Oct. 28, as Trump’s motorcade was leaving Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia. Reporters and photographers in a car behind her captured the moment, which quickly spread online and became a source of many jokes on late-night television.
But Briskman’s employer, Akima LLC, did not find it funny.
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When she returned to work the following week, she said, company executives told her she needed to resign. Briskman, 50, had violated the company’s social media policy on obscenity by sharing the image on Facebook and Twitter, they told her, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia.
The executives also feared blowback from the Trump administration, lawyers for Briskman said in the lawsuit.
“Akima’s actions — forcing Juli to resign out of fear of unlawful retaliation by the government — violated the basic tenets of Virginia employment law,” one of them, Maria Simon, said in a statement. “Ms. Briskman chose in her private time and in her capacity as a private citizen to express her disapproval of President Trump by extending her middle finger.”
Source:thestar.com