A cyclist who flipped off the presidential motorcade has been fired from her job at a government contractor because of her actions.
Remember the cyclist who flipped off @POTUS? She's just been fired. #FirstAmendment https://t.co/c3ftF7pXPI pic.twitter.com/MImYSpA4e2
— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) November 6, 2017
On October 28th, President Trump’s motorcade was leaving the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, V.A. when it passed cyclist Juli Briskman. Briskman gave Trump’s car the middle finger as it passed, and then again when she passed them from behind. “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,” she told the Huffington Post.
A photograph of her giving the middle finger, snapped by someone in the White House Press Pool, went viral hours later. When Briskman came back to work the following Monday, she informed management at government contractor Akima LLC that she was the woman in the photo. By the next day, she says, she had been fired for using the photo as her cover photo on Facebook and Twitter.
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman told The Huffington Post. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things on your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’”Briskman believes that her termination was unfair, as another colleague had publicly called someone a “f—ing libtard a–hole” while using the Akima logo as his profile picture, and had not been disciplined. “How is that any less ‘obscene’ than me flipping off the president? How is that fair?”
In her interview with HuffPost, Briskman said that she had emphasized the fact that she had not been working when the photo was taken, and that her social media profile wasn’t connected to Akima. But management allegedly told her that, because Akima was a government contractor, the photo could damage their reputation or their relationship with the government. Akima has not responded to requests for comments from the press.
AKIMA LLC
Briskman is aiming to find a new job with an advocacy group like Planned Parenthood or Peta. In the meantime, supporters have set up a GoFundMe page to help support the mother of two as she finds a new job. At the time of publication, the page had raised 32k of its 100K goal.
And although Briskman was fired, she has no regrets. “In some ways, I’m doing better than ever,” she told The Huffington Post. “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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