A lady previously employed by the Trump Nationwide Golf Membership filed a lawsuit in opposition to the Donald Trump-owned enterprise Wednesday claiming she was pressured into intercourse by her supervisor and coerced by Trump’s private lawyer into signing an unlawful nondisclosure settlement.
Alice Bianco filed her lawsuit in opposition to the Bedminster, New Jersey, membership within the state’s Middlesex County Superior Court docket. In her declare, first reported by Politico, Bianco makes a sequence of disturbing allegations about her expertise as a server on the membership in 2021 when she was 21.
Inside her first month of employment, Bianco alleges, the membership’s meals and beverage supervisor, Pavel Melichar, started sexually harassing her by making her put on brief uniform skirts and giving her a bottle of Cognac as a present, which finally led to him forcibly kidding her and asking her “what she was going to do for him” in alternate for her job safety. Melichar, who was in his mid-50s, would present Bianco movies of Trump praising him “in order that she knew he was highly effective,” the lawsuit alleges.
Regardless of Bianco’s rejections, Melichar ramped up his harassment, the lawsuit claims, and “made it clear to her that he might make her life simple or arduous.” He then allegedly “started to require [Bianco] to have interaction in intercourse as a quid professional quo for continued employment and ‘safety,’ as he referred to as it,’” over the following two months, then retaliated in opposition to her with unfair work assignments and stolen ideas when she demanded an finish to the sexual harassment.
Trump’s private lawyer Alina Habba then stepped into the fray after one among Bianco’s co-workers wrote a letter to the previous president’s private workers accusing Melichar and different supervisors of harassment, the lawsuit states. The submitting claims Habba then approached her at work and stated she “had heard” about her scenario and will “assist her,” pressuring the younger lady to fireplace an employment lawyer she’d employed to counsel her within the matter.
As soon as Bianco was with out authorized illustration, the lawsuit claims, Habba referred to as her to a gathering in her automobile, recognized herself as a rape sufferer and advised her it was in Bianco’s finest curiosity to not go public along with her claims. As a substitute, Habba allegedly stated, her finest plan of action could be to signal a nondisclosure settlement. Bianco signed it with out seeing a replica of the settlement and acquired solely a “paltry settlement,” the quantity of which was not said within the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks the court docket to dam the NDA’s enforcement, let Bianco preserve the settlement cash, power the membership to pay her authorized charges and refer Habba’s actions to the New Jersey Workplace of Lawyer Ethics.
In statements to Politico, each Melichar and Habba dismissed Bianco’s claims.
“I don’t know something about it and I’ve nothing to say,” Melichar stated. Habba responded: “I at all times conduct myself ethically and acted no otherwise on this circumstance.”
The Trump Nationwide Golf Membership at Bedminster didn’t instantly return HuffPost’s request for remark.
Trump isn’t named in Bianco’s lawsuit, however at least 26 women have come ahead with sexual assault or harassment allegations in opposition to him all through his profession. Earlier this yr, a federal jury held him accountable in one of the crucial high-profile of these accusations, discovering him responsible of sexually assaulting author E. Jean Carroll in a division retailer dressing room in New York Metropolis within the mid-Nineteen Nineties.
Need assistance? Go to RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
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