Omarosa Manigault Newman.Photo: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
An arbitrator has refutedDonald Trump’s claimthat former aide andThe Apprenticestar Omarosa Manigault Newman violated a non-disclosure agreement after she published the tell-all bookUnhingedabout the former president.
New York arbitrator T. Andrew Brownruled that the agreementis “vague and unenforceable.” He also wrote in his decision that Trump’s campaign must pay Manigault Newman’s legal fees and costs.
“It’s pretty remarkable,” Manigault Newman, now a first-year law student at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, tells PEOPLE. “People generally don’t win when Donald Trump chooses to bring an arbitration action against them.
“He has strategically utilized this forum to kind of bully and harass people and generally it works for him,” she continues. “Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work this time.”
In a statement, she adds: “Finally the bully has met his match!”
Omarosa Manigault Newman and Donald Trump.Michael Reynolds/UPI/Shutterstock
Says John Phillips, Manigault Newman’s attorney, in a statement: “We’ve won in Donald Trump and the Trump Campaign’s chosen forum.”
In a statement sent to PEOPLE, the former president says:
“I gave Omarosa three attempts atThe Apprenticeand she failed. At her desperate request I gave her an attempt at the White House and she failed there too, people truly hated her. At least now I don’t have to let her fail anymore.
“Nobody in her life has done more for Omarosa than a man named Donald Trump. Unfortunately, like certain others, she forgot all about that — which is fine with me!”
Trump has a history of requiring those who work for him tosign non-disclosure agreements.
Brown’s Sept. 24 rulingis the second this yearin which the NDA agreements were deemed unenforceable.
In 2018, Manigault Newman released a book about Trump calledUnhinged, in which she made a number of alarming — and disputed — accusations, including that the presidentwas in “mental decline.”
Omarosa Manigault Newman.Paul Archuleta/Getty
Soon after the book’s publication, Trump’s campaignfiled the arbitration, saying that Manigault Newman had violated a 2016 confidentiality agreement.
However, Brown, the arbitrator, said that “the Agreement effectively imposes on [Manigault Newman] an obligation to never say anything remotely critical of Mr. Trump, his family or his or his family members' businesses for the rest of her life.
“Such a burden is certainly unreasonable,” he wrote.
Says Manigault Newman of the years since the arbitration filing: “It was tremendously stressful, expensive, and exhausting.”
*WITH REPORTING BY VIRGINIA CHAMLEE
source: people.com
