WASHINGTON — A former Trump campaign staffer filed a class action Wednesday seeking to invalidate all of the nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements that the Trump campaign required all staffers to sign.



The claims brought by former campaign staffer Jessica Denson represent the broadest attack to date on the Trump campaign’s practice of having staffers, volunteers, and contractors sign agreements barring them from ever publicly criticizing Trump, his company, or his family, and from disclosing private or confidential information.

The Trump campaign has gone after several former staffers who publicly aired their grievances against Trump, his administration, or his campaign, including Omarosa Manigault Newman and Cliff Sims, who recently wrote a book about his time in the White House called Team of Vipers. Denson was ordered to pay nearly $50,000 to the campaign after filing a workplace discrimination and harassment lawsuit in 2017.

Denson has been tangling with the Trump campaign on multiple fronts in court and in arbitration. Her class action case was filed before the American Arbitration Association Wednesday. Individual arbitration proceedings normally take place in secret, but class action cases are public.

Denson’s lawyers estimate thousands of campaign staffers, volunteers, and contractors signed NDAs and could be covered by the case. If the nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements that they signed were thrown out, these former staffers would be free to talk about their time on the campaign — and to criticize the campaign or the president without fear of facing financial penalties.

Denson’s lawyers argue the campaign’s standard NDA is unlawful because it penalizes employees for exercising their right to sue for things like workplace discrimination and harassment, unpaid wages, and violations of workplace safety laws, and for claiming violations of campaign finance laws, corruption, or fraud.

“The Form NDAs effectively strip employees, contractors, and volunteers of their ability to pursue any of their rights to redress workplace misconduct,” Denson’s lawyers wrote in the arbitration filing. “Anything and everything they could do will of necessity contain some information that a Trump Person could find disparaging or a disclosure of confidential information.”

Her lawyers are also arguing that the language of the NDA is too vague — it gives Trump himself discretion to decide what is “private” and “confidential” — doesn’t have any time or geographic limits, “lacks a legitimate purpose,” and is void because it allows a government actor — in this case, the president — to restrain a person’s free speech rights under the First Amendment.

“Indeed, any person who has ever signed the Form NDA, whether or not he or she has entered into government service, subjects himself or herself to grievous financial penalty for the mere act of engaging in constitutionally protected criticism of the sitting President of the United States,” Denson’s lawyers wrote.

The NDA that Denson signed, which her lawyers contend was the same document used for other campaign staffers, volunteers, and contractors, applies not only when staffers worked for the campaign, but also “at all times thereafter.”