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The list of women who’ve accused Donald Trump of misconduct is not short. One of them even filed a lawsuit against the Republican that unexpectedly led to a series of interesting developments.
Three years ago, a former Trump campaign worker named Alva Johnson alleged that in August 2016, the then-candidate grabbed her at a campaign stop and kissed her on the mouth against her will. Her case, however, did not go well: A Trump-appointed judge in Florida dismissed her complaint as “political” and said a video of the encounter did not bolster Johnson’s case.
She had some other legal options, but Johnson ultimately dropped the matter, citing threats from the then-president’s supporters.
But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Trump’s lawyers soon after responded to the failed lawsuit by filing an arbitration complaint: The former campaign aide, the Republican team claimed, had violated a non-disclosure agreement when she sued the then-president. Johnson lost her case, but just as importantly, The New York Times reported that Team Trump lost its case, too.
Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign has been ordered to pay more than $300,000 in legal fees and expenses to a former employee who the campaign’s lawyers said had violated the terms of a nondisclosure agreement when she accused Mr. Trump of forcibly kissing her in 2016. The award, the culmination of an arbitration claim that was dismissed in November, represents the latest instance of Mr. Trump’s failure to use a nondisclosure agreement successfully against an ex-worker.
Victor Bianchini, the retired federal judge who adjudicated the arbitration complaint, concluded that the Trump campaign “was invested in silencing other employees that were terminated or had somehow criticized the candidate in other ways.”
He added that one of the underlying points of the campaign’s challenge was “curtailing any criticism of the candidate.”
At face value, this is an embarrassing — and rather expensive — legal setback for the former president and his team. But just below the surface, there’s a larger significance to this: Team Trump’s cases regarding non-disclosure agreements keep going badly. From the Times’ article:
The resolution of the claim, which Mr. Trump’s campaign filed in September 2019, came less than a year after he had lost similar efforts to enforce nondisclosure agreements against Jessica Denson, a former campaign worker, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide and a star on “The Apprentice.”
What’s more, Team Trump’s non-disclosure case against Stephanie Winston-Wolkoff didn’t work out well, and neither did the case against Mary Trump.
The message to others seems unmistakable: There may be others holding back because they signed an NDA and fear the consequences of breaking it. The more Team Trump’s attempts to enforce these agreements fall short, the less incentive his former employees have to remain silent.