Alva Johnson is the latest woman to allege President Donald Trump committed sexual misconduct. And sadly, she’s blaming herself but is trying to do the right thing by coming forward, The Daily Beast reports.
Johnson, 43, alleged Monday that Trump kissed her forcibly right before a 2016 rally in Florida.
“She feels partly responsible for helping put a sexual predator into the White House, and she believes she has an obligation to tell her story and to hold him accountable for what he’s done to her but to so many other women,” said Johnson’s attorney, Hassan Zavareei told The Daily Beast.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, she accuses Trump of kissing her on the side of her lips, which she tried to avoid by turning her head, something that made her feel “violated” because she wasn’t expecting it. Trump’s campaign staff has denied this in a series of interviews with The Washington Post, Mediaite reports.
She said she considered come forward with the allegations in October 2016 when the now infamously leaked Access Hollywood video showed Trump saying he enjoys kissing women without asking for their consent because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Zavareei said Johnson never returned to the campaign after the video was leaked.
“It was the first time she was able to contextualize what happened to her,” he said. “When he told her — and the rest of the country — his modus operandi for how he sexually attacks women.”
The lawsuit states that Trump grabbed her hand and leaned in to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her head to avoid the “super-creepy and inappropriate” kiss.
“I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it,” she told The Post. “I can still see his lips coming straight for my face.”
Johnson met with a lawyer two months later, who began preparing a lawsuit, but even though that lawyer said Johnson had a good case, he declined the case “for business reasons.”
When Trump recovered from the Access Hollywood scandal, Johnson “got very scared and very frightened and decided to sort of ‘get in line,’ and that’s how she continued to function after he was elected president,” Zavareei said.
But that changed after the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, especially after Trump called white supremacist protesters “very fine people.” She felt the horror of every national controversy, the attorney said. But the one that most upset her was Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents when they came into the U.S. without documentation.
“It made her feel like she had some responsibility, having worked on his campaign,” said Zavareei. “She hired us in the summer, and we’ve been working on this and investigating since. It takes a while.”
In the lawsuit, filed in federal court, Johnson is seeking unspecified damages for emotional pain and suffering.
Zavareei talks with The Washington Post in the video below.
Featured image courtesy of the video above.
