An attorney suing Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign for allegedly failing to stop sexual abuse has accused it of using Wizard of Oz tactics to cover up her latest revelation.
"The fact is Defendants are imitating the Wizard of Oz in the third act of the classic film, frantically pulling at levers trying to shut the curtain and shrieking: 'Nothing to see here!' when the curtain has already revealed there is," A.J. Delgado wrote in her July 4 court filing. "The only question remaining is whether this Court will allow Defendants to get away with it."
In the same filing, Delgado alleged that it was Trump's former legal adviser, Jenna Ellis, who had secretly revealed to her that the Trump campaign had faced a previous lawsuit for sexual harassment.
Delgado was seeking the information as part of her long-running lawsuit against the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Delgado sued after she claimed that she was raped by a Trump senior adviser, with whom she was having an affair.
In a previous court filing, Delgado had included a June 12, 2024, text from a former Trump adviser, with the identity of the texter redacted.
The texter told her that the campaign had faced a previous sexual assault claim and identified a senior Trump adviser as the man at the center of those accusations.
In response, the 2016 Trump campaign lawyers accused Delgado in a July 3 filing of either inventing the source or accepting inaccurate information from an anonymous source only loosely attached to the Trump campaign.
Delgado then shot back in her July 4 filing that it was Ellis, a high-profile former Trump legal adviser, who told her about the previous lawsuit, and this time filed an unredacted copy of the text, allegedly showing Ellis as the sender.
"Given the Defendants' filing yesterday, in which Defendants publicly continue to question Plaintiff's integrity and publicly now imply she is, at best, fibbing, and that the adviser who provided Plaintiff this information was probably not, in fact, someone who would be privy to this information and Plaintiff was thus misrepresenting matters, Plaintiff thus has no alternative but to file the unredacted version and does so herein," she wrote.
"The adviser who disclosed this information, given her integrity and honesty, to Plaintiff was Jenna Ellis, Esq."
"Ms. Ellis was not only a senior adviser but a senior legal adviser. She is an attorney and is credible. She was a highly senior member of the Campaign and precisely in the position to be privy to this information," Delgado wrote.
Newsweek emailed the Trump campaign, direct messaged Ellis on Facebook and sent a message to Delgado through her GoFundMe account for comments.
Ellis was a major star of Trump's successful 2016 presidential election campaign and often spoke at Trump rallies wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign hat.
In August 2023, she was indicted in Georgia with Trump and 17 others for alleged election fraud in Georgia during the 2020 election campaign. A tearful Ellis eventually pleaded guilty in court and has agreed to testify against others if required, while Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Ellis has since been a critic of Trump and has said publicly that she wished she had not become involved in his campaign.
Jason Miller, a political strategist and Trump ally, has denied Delgado's allegations that he raped her while they were having an affair.
In a previous court filing, Delgado, a lawyer and senior adviser during Trump's first presidential run, claimed Miller committed a "cycle of sexual coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking" during their time together.
Delgado became pregnant and later gave birth to Miller's child following the affair. Delgado wrote last year on X, formerly Twitter, that the two had reached an agreement on October 31, 2023, on child support payments.
On November 8, 2023, in a series of X posts, she then described Miller as "a demon" who "acted like a CRAZY abuser" while coming to the agreement.
Delgado is suing the 2016 Trump campaign, as well as several former Trump advisers, for allegedly failing to stop Miller's alleged abuse. They, and Miller, have strongly denied the allegations.
"History has shown a pattern of conduct by Delgado simply intended to harass my family while wasting the judiciary's time and resources," Miller told Newsweek when Delgado's lawsuit was filed in November 2023.
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Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more
