A former campaign staffer says that Donald Trump kissed her without her consent in 2016; she’s the first woman to accuse him of sexual misconduct after his presidential campaign began.
Alva Johnson, who worked for the Trump campaign in Florida, says that Trump grabbed her hand and kissed her on the lips outside a rally in Tampa in August 2016.
“I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it,” Johnson told the Washington Post. “I can still see his lips coming straight for my face.”
Her allegation is consistent with a pattern that Trump himself has described.
On that infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape, Trump can be heard saying, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them.”
“It’s like a magnet,” he adds. “Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”
After the tape was released by the Washington Post in October 2016, more than a dozen other women have publicly accused Trump of touching them in some inappropriate way.
Johnson is the only accuser to come forward since he took office and the only one to allege unwanted contact during the campaign.
Trump faces a defamation lawsuit in New York brought by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” reality TV contestant, who claims he forcibly kissed and groped her in 2007.
Trump has denied all the allegations against him, and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called Johnson’s claim “absurd on its face.”
But Johnson’s allegation, and a lawsuit she is filing in federal court, could cause trouble for him in the run-up to 2020.
Johnson, 43, was a two-time Obama voter when she met Trump in 2015, she told the Post.
But Johnson, who is black, thought Trump might be able to use his business skills to help black communities.
When she first met Trump at a 2015 rally in Birmingham, Alabama, he looked her up and down and said, “Oh, beautiful, beautiful, fantastic,” she says in her lawsuit.
Despite this comment, she took a job as director of outreach and coalitions for the Trump campaign, working first in Alabama and later in Florida.
Alva Johnson worked on the Trump campaign in Tampa.
As Trump exited his RV outside the Tampa rally, she says in the lawsuit that he passed by her.
“I’ve been on the road for you since March, away from my family,” she says she told him. “You’re doing an awesome job. Go in there and kick ass.”
Then, she said, he grabbed her hand, thanked her for her work, and leaned close.
“Oh, my God, I think he’s going to kiss me,” she said in an interview, describing the moment. “He’s coming straight for my lips. So I turn my head, and he kisses me right on corner of my mouth, still holding my hand the entire time. Then he walks on out.”
She said she stood there, feeling humiliated.
“I’ve tried to let it go,” she said, beginning to cry. “You want to move on with your life. I don’t sleep. I wake up at 4 in the morning looking at the news. I feel guilty. The only thing I did was show up for work one day.”
Johnson’s team named Pam Bondi, then Florida’s attorney general, and Karen Giorno, then-director of the Florida campaign, as witnesses of the alleged kiss, but both women have publicly denied having seen anything.
“Both of the so-called witnesses are lying,” said Johnson’s attorney Hassan Zavareei, noting that a PAC supporting Bondi accepted a potentially illegal $25,000 donation from Trump in 2013, and then she decided not to prosecute a case against the Trump Foundation. “Bondi has suspect credibility….She’s just not to be believed.”
Johnson also told the Post that she discussed the unwanted kiss at the time with her then-boyfriend, mother, and stepfather, all of whom recalled the conversations.
Johnson kept working for the campaign, but after she heard the Access Hollywood tape, she said, “I felt sick to my stomach.”
“That was what he did to me,” she added.
She quit about three weeks before the election.
In October 2016, she also consulted with a lawyer.
According to text messages provided to the Post, the lawyer found her story credible but did not take her case because “right now my practice simply cannot dive into something like that which would be so time-consuming with an uncertain outcome.”
Johnson filed suit today in federal court. In addition to detailing her sexual misconduct allegation, the suit also alleges that Johnson was paid less than her white male colleagues on the campaign.
After Trump became president, Johnson twice applied for jobs with the administration, but was unsuccessful.
She claims this experience did not influence her decision to sue.
Johnson’s allegation comes as Trump gears up for his 2020 reelection bid.
Sexual misconduct allegations against him obviously did not derail his 2016 campaign.
But that was before the growing #MeToo movement ushered in a nationwide reckoning around sexual harassment and assault.
Republican voters have generally been more skeptical around #MeToo allegations than Democrats, but some Republican women have become frustrated with their party’s relative inaction around sexual misconduct.