Cyclist Who Gave Donald Trump the Middle Finger Is Fired From Job
The woman who gave President Trump‘s motorcade the middle finger in a photo that went viral in October has been fired from her job over the “obscene” gesture.
In a recent interview with HuffPost, Juli Briskman said she was surprised that someone had snapped a photo of her when she flipped the procession off on her regular biking route in Virginia last weekend.
“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she told HuffPost of the incident. “I’m thinking DACA recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one-third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, ‘He’s at the damn golf course again.’ I flipped off the motorcade a number of times.”
The photo was posted online and quickly went viral over the weekend; by Monday, Briskman decided to nip the issue in the bud and tell her employer’s HR department what had happened.
On Tuesday, Briskman’s employer, government contractor Akima LLC, had decided to cut ties with the woman whom social media had proclaimed a “she-ro.”
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,'” Briskman told HuffPost. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.'”
Briskman’s bosses said that she had specifically violated company policy after using the photo as her profile picture on both Twitter and Facebook, despite the fact that Briskman pointed out to the executives that she wasn’t on the job when the incident occurred, and her social media pages don’t link her to Akima in any way.
The executives reportedly told Briskman that the problem was that Akima was a government contractor, and the photo could hurt their business.
Briskman has since contacted the American Civil Liberties Union about her case, and according to an interview with The Washington Post, she doesn’t regret her actions despite the consequences.
“I’d do it again,” she said.