A woman who flipped the bird at President Trump’s motorcade and gained attention on social media for it has been fired from her government contracting job.
Juli Briskman, a 50-year-old who used to work as a marketing executive at Akima LLC, gave the middle finger to President Trump’s motorcade as she was biking alongside it on the road in Sterling, Virginia, on October 29 and got the boot from her job on October 31, the Washington Post reported.
According to the White House pool reporter on duty that day, Trump had been on his way back to Washington, DC, after spending some time at the Trump National Golf Club.
“POTUS’s motorcade departed the Trump National Golf Club at 3:12 p.m., passing two pedestrians, one of whom gave a thumbs-down sign. Then it overtook a female cyclist, wearing a white top and cycling helmet, who responded by giving the middle finger,” the pool report said.
Someone took notice of Briskman’s gesture and posted a photo of it to social media. The photo soon went viral, and she decided to give human resources at her company a heads up October 30 that she was the person in the photo.
Briskman’s bosses at Akima LLC called her into their office the next day and decided to tell her the bad news.
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman told HuffPost when asked about the firing. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’”
The company said the press from the photo would have hurt their business, especially since they do business with the government as a government contractor. Under Akima’s social media policy, “discriminatory, obscene malicious or threatening content, [or] knowingly false” social media content is grounds for “termination of employment.”
Briskman said her supervisors showed her the clause in the contract when they fired her.
Briskman, however, has no regrets about her gesture. The self-identified Democrat said she plans to look for a job with left-wing advocacy groups such as PETA and Planned Parenthood.
“In some ways, I’m doing better than ever,” Briskman said. “I’m angry about where our country is right now. I am appalled. This was an opportunity for me to say something.”
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