She gave Trump the finger and was fired from her job

Source: Cyclist Lost Her Job After Raising Middle Finger at Trump’s Motorcade – The New York Times

Oh, I’m sure you’ve all heard about this one. The news is everywhere. I can’t imagine why.

Here’s my excuse for mentioning it here: a potential lawsuit.

Here’s the story:

Juli Briskman, 50, was riding her bicycle on Lowes Island Boulevard after 3 p.m. on Oct. 28 when she found herself sharing a lane with President Trump’s motorcade, which was leaving the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Va. As the fleet of about a half-dozen vehicles started to roll slowly past her, she thought briefly of cutting between the cars and riding away.

Instead, Ms. Briskman made the spontaneous gesture. It was captured by news cameras and soon became a moment shared across social media.

“Honestly, my blood started boiling at that point,” she said in an interview on Monday, describing when the motorcade overtook her. “I saw somebody holding a newspaper; I assumed he was in there.”

Her blood boiled for all our blood. We’re boiling with you, Juli.

The moment might have faded into obscurity. But riding along with the president’s motorcade was a gaggle of journalists and photographers who captured the gesture in images that were distributed far and wide, spreading online.

Yeah, but then Juli was open enough to do this:

By Monday morning, Oct. 30, Ms. Briskman had affixed the image on her Facebook and Twitter accounts. Neither account identified her as an employee of Akima L.L.C., which oversees government contractors and where she had been employed as a marketing analyst for a little more than six months. But she decided it would be a good idea to mention it to a human resources official at her employer.

“I went in and I said: ‘Have you heard about the bike woman?’” Ms. Briskman said. The human resources official said no. “You’re going to have to look that up,” Ms. Briskman told her. “It’s me.”

On Oct. 31, she was called into a meeting with the official and two other company executives.

“We have chosen to separate from you,” she quoted one of them as saying to her, citing the company’s social media policy ban on “obscene content.”

“Separate from you”??? What is this, a piece of dialogue from Brokeback Mountain that went into the shredder?

Anyway, there’s more nasty stuff elsewhere on the internet about someone at Akima who once tweeted something much, much worse (but not against Trump), and Juli gave Trump the finger on her own time.

There’s a big argument going around about Virginia, a state without particular protections for employees. That is, it’s a right-to-fire state. (I made that up; it’s actually a “right-to-work” state, i.e., let’s kill unions.) And how Juli can’t sue because her employer had the right to fire her for whatever, for anything.

That’s not quite true.

So, Juli, sue their asses off.

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