A cyclist who went viral after giving President Donald Trump’s motorcade the finger was fired for posting a picture of the gesture to social media, she told several outlets.
“I’d do it again,” Juli Briskman, 50, told Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak in a post published Monday.
Briskman worked for the government contractor Akima LLC, until she told them about the photo. Briskman told the Post and HuffPost that she was fired for violating Akima’s social media policy.
Briskman’s bird twittered across the web on Oct. 28:
Pool: Motorcade "overtook a female cyclist… who responded by giving the middle finger… cyclist caught up, still offering the finger."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 28, 2017
Trump's motorcade "overtook a cyclist… who responded by giving the middle finger… cyclist caught up, still offering the finger." #resist pic.twitter.com/8aTFZpN6ff
— SeriouslyUS? (@USseriously) October 29, 2017
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,‘” Briskman told HuffPost, recalling a conversation with her Akima superiors. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’”
A colleague, she noted to both publications, had faced minimal consequences for comparable social media obscenity: He called someone “a fucking Libtard asshole” on Facebook, but kept his job.
Briskman told HuffPost she’d been biking in Virginia, thinking critically about Trump’s performance in office, when she saw the President’s motorcade pass.
“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she said. “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.”
She added: “I flipped off the motorcade a number of times.”
