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Server inside Washington, DC was fired after she said she would refuse to serve certain officials Donald Trump‘s incoming administration who are accused of sexual abuse.
The server worked at Beuchert’s Saloon Capitol Hill when she made the comments Washingtonian magazine for a DC story preparing for the arrival of Trump officials in the city’s restaurants.
After the story was published, Fox News led his story she followed up on her comments and learned that she was fired due to what her employer called “fundamental prejudice.”
“I personally would refuse to serve any person in office who I know is a sex trafficker or they are trying to deport millions people,” Suzannah Van Rooy told the magazine. “It’s not, ‘Oh, we hate Republicans.’ It’s that this person has moral beliefs that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don’t feel comfortable serving them.”
She said that while she expects most servers to just grin and bear having to serve people they morally and ideologically oppose, she hopes some will make their opposition clear.
“People were much more motivated the first time to do those kinds of displays of passion. This time there’s a kind of sense of defeat and acceptance,” she told the magazine. “But I hope people continue to stand up to this administration and tell them what they think of their bad behavior.”
Beuchert called Van Rooy’s comments to the magazine “unacceptable.”
“Recent comments by a member of staff who was not authorized to speak for our entire restaurant have rightly been labeled as inappropriate, hostile, intolerant and unacceptable. This staff member does NOT speak for us as a restaurant,” the restaurant said in a statement.
As previously reported, a number of new Trump officials – and Trump himself – have been accused of sexual misconduct. Ella E magazine writer Jean Carroll was awarded more than $80 million after a defamation trial in which he was found liable for sexual assault.
Former Congressman Matt Gaetz was under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House Ethics Committee over allegations of sexual relations with a minor before dropping out of consideration for Trump’s attorney general.
He withdrew his nomination hours before CNN published the report the second alleged sexual encounter with a 17-year-old girl.
Elon Musk — tapped by Trump to run the pseudo-agency “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — is sued by eight former SpaceX employees due to allegations of sexual harassment.
In the lawsuit, former employees allege that Musk “treated women as sex objects judged by their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter.”
Trump’s proposed defense secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member from the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017, and Robert F Kennedy Jr – Trump’s nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services – was accused of sexually abusing a former nanny in the 1990s.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s proposed choice for Secretary of Educationwas named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, former WWE boss Vince McMahon, failed to stop an officer who sexually abused children in the 1980s and 1990s.
Vince McMahon is also being sued for allegedly sex-trafficking a woman in his employ.
This isn’t the first time drama involving the Trump administration and D.C. restaurants has made headlines.
Former Trump press secretary Sarah Hackabee Sanders was kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia in 2018 by his co-owner, saying she had “publicly defended the president’s most cruel policies.”
Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters soon made headlines she called on supporters to oppose Trump officials in public spaces such as restaurants to inform them that the public opposes their policies. Republicans argued at the time that Waters was encouraging public damage to administration officials.
Around the same time, protesters confronted Trump’s then Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen while dining at a local Mexican restaurant and expressing their opposition to the administration’s mass deportation policy.
Protesters, including members of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, entered the MXDC Cocina Mexicana near the White House with signs and jeered the official.
Van Rooy removed her LinkedIn profile, presumably to avoid harassment from angry Trump supporters.