More women than ever are adding “activist” to their résumés—and facing professional fallout. Is the risk worth the rewards?
Juli Briskman has always been a registered Democrat, but the most recent U.S. presidential election “sparked something in me,” she says. Each day, her anger toward President Donald Trump and his policies on immigration and the environment grew. Until, on October 28, 2017, she got her chance to show Trump how she felt.
While biking near Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, the Virginia resident spotted a line of black cars: the presidential motorcade. “I was so enraged about the image I had in my head of Trump throwing paper towels at people [in Puerto Rico]. And the fact that he’s at the golf course again! The fourth weekend,” she tells me. Just feet away from the black vans, she raised her middle finger in a gesture of defiance. The moment was immortalized by Agence France-Presse photographer Brendan Smialowski, and then tweeted out by another journalist, Voice of America White House bureau chief Steve Herman. It went viral, retweeted by over 30,000 people. Briskman, 50, “outed” herself by posting the image as her cover photo on Facebook and Twitter. Then came the reckoning: The yoga studio where she worked part-time as an instructor began getting aggressive e-mails and bogus bad reviews on the studio’s social page. When Briskman went to work on Monday to her other job as a marketing analyst for a government contracting group called Akima, she gave HR a heads up about her new turn as a social-media star. By Halloween, she’d been fired and escorted out of the building, her employers citing the company’s social-media policy against “obscene” content on personal sites.
This story is from the March 2018 edition of Marie Claire - US.
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This story is from the March 2018 edition of Marie Claire - US.
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