Ex-White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who filed a motion this week seeking to join a lawsuit against the Trump presidential campaign alleging pay discrimination, said Tuesday she was paid significantly less than her male counterpart on the campaign and the numbers behind the suit “don’t lie.”
“To hear that there were so many other women who got paid 20 percent less across the board, I’m talking about on the state level, the local level and national level … I wanted to join the efforts,” Manigault Newman said during an interview on MSNBC.
"The numbers don’t lie," she said.
Manigault Newman, who came to know Trump as a contestant on his reality television show “The Apprentice” and later worked for his 2016 presidential campaign, said she was paid $7,000 a month for her work on the campaign, but her male counterpart was paid $11,000 a month "for doing the same job.”
Manigault Newman worked in the Trump administration as the communications director for the White House Office of Public Liaison but was forced out of the job in December 2017. Months later, she released secret recordings of Trump.
In a motion filed Monday in a Florida federal court, Manigault Newman sought to join the proposed class action alleging gender pay discrimination by the Trump campaign. The lead attorney for the lawsuit said it is based on an expert analysis of Federal Election Commission data that he said shows the campaign paid its female employees 18.2 percent less than its male employees.
“This case is about two things: Donald Trump’s predation, and his campaign’s discrimination against women and people of color," the attorney, Hassan Zavareei, said in a statement Monday. "Our filing today advances our claim for sex discrimination by seeking collective action certification on behalf of female campaign staffers.”
The Trump campaign has denied the allegations.
“The Trump campaign has never discriminated based on race, ethnicity, gender, or any other basis. Any allegation suggesting otherwise is off base and unfounded,” the campaign said in a statement Monday night.
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The case was initially brought by Alva Johnson, an African-American woman who worked on Trump’s campaign and previously claimed he kissed her without her consent at a campaign rally in August 2016. The White House has dismissed Johnson's allegation that Trump kissed her as "absurd on its face."
