Trump Claims, Without Evidence, That Kavanaugh Protesters Were Paid

President Donald Trump on Friday claimed without evidence that some of the women protesting his embattled Supreme Court nominee by confronting senators in elevators had been paid to do so.

Two women approached Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., inside an elevator last week and shared their stories of being sexually assaulted, as they asked him not to support the nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. A third woman confronted Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, outside an elevator Thursday, and he waved her off and told her to grow up.

“The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” Trump said in a tweet. “Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love!”

One of the women who confronted Flake, Ana Maria Archila, the executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a New York-based liberal organizing group, said she had not been paid.

“President Trump is at it again,” she said. “He’s trying to bully people who are there to speak up, women who are there to speak up. And I am not distracted. His accusation that we are paid protesters is wrong.”

The president’s tweet came hours before the Senate narrowly voted to end debate on Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct. Those allegations have prompted an outcry and multiple demonstrations, including Thursday, when thousands of protesters, most of them female, gathered in the capital. A final vote on the nomination could come as soon as Saturday.

The tweet echoed a common trope among those on the far right: that opponents are being paid for their political activism. George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist who is progressive and Jewish, is often falsely accused of providing the funds.

The women who stopped Flake, Archila and Maria Gallagher, had implored him not to support Kavanaugh as he said he would. The emotional scene, which was televised on CNN, resonated with many people, and hours later, Flake upended the vote planned for that day by asking the FBI to investigate Kavanaugh.

“Don’t look away from me,” Gallagher tearfully insisted. “Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me, that you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land and tell everyone what they can do to their bodies.”

Archila, who is also a national committee member of the Working Families Party, said Friday that before confronting Flake, Gallagher had never spoken to a lawmaker.

“We spent 20 minutes before our conversation with Sen. Flake talking about how to talk to an elected official, and what I said to her was, ‘Speak from your heart,'” Archila said.

Archila said she and others had returned to Capitol Hill on Friday to continue to share their stories with senators.

“We are doing something incredibly important by sharing our pain, by sharing one of the most traumatic experiences of our lives,” she said. “We’re doing it together to allow the country to look at itself. It’s like a mirror.”