Ex-Trump staffer suing over pregnancy discrimination
A spokeswoman and outreach staffer on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, A.J. Delgado, is suing the campaign and several of its top advisers for pregnancy and sex discrimination.
Delgado’s suit, filed Monday in federal court in Manhattan, claims she was sidelined by campaign officials about six weeks after the 2016 election — shortly after she told senior officials that she was pregnant.
The lawsuit refers only in passing to a sensational, headline-grabbing aspect of Delgado’s pregnancy: She said the father of her unborn child was a married, senior staffer on the campaign, senior communication adviser Jason Miller. (The child was born in July 2017.)
In addition to the campaign the lawsuit names Trump’s transition organization, Trump for America, as a defendant, along with Trump aides Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.
“Immediately after Plaintiff Delgado announced her pregnancy, the Campaign and TFA, including Spicer, Bannon and Priebus, Plaintiff’s supervisors, stripped Plaintiff of her job responsibilities and duties throughout for the remainder of her employment from late December of 2016 and through the Inauguration in late January of 2017,” the suit says.
“Plaintiff immediately and inexplicably stopped receiving emails and other communications from the Campaign and TFA, including about projects on which she was currently working.” Delgado’s complaint adds. “Plaintiff was excluded from participating in the communications work of the Inauguration or in any capacity, even though she was still formally part of the Communications Transition team.”
A spokeswoman for Trump’s current presidential bid, which is run through the same corporate entity as his 2016 campaign, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit.
The new suit adds to a pile of litigation related to Miller and Delgado’s affair, including a libel suit Miller filed last year against the website Splinter stemming from claims Delgado made during a paternity proceeding and an arbitration the campaign filed against Delgado in a bid to stop her from talking publicly about her role on the campaign.
A federal judge ruled against Miller’s libel suit last August, but that decision is on appeal.
The status of the arbitration brought against Delgado is unclear, but her new suit alleges the Trump campaign filed the action in retribution after backing away from a settlement both sides tentatively agreed to over her discrimination claims.
During the transition, Miller was tapped to be communications director for the Trump White House. However, he withdrew after reports of the affair with Delgado emerged. Miller later became a paid commentator for CNN, but parted company with the network in September 2018 following the Splinter report, which said Miller had been accused in court filings of slipping an abortion pill to another woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. He adamantly denied that.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said President Donald Trump was personally named as a defendant in the suit.
