Juli Briskman GoFundMe Raises $100,000 For Woman Who Gave Trump The Finger

Juli Briskman, the woman who broke the internet last month for showing the middle-finger at President Donald Trump’s convoy, has made nearly $100,000 via two GoFundMe donation pages.

One of the pages was made by Rob Mello where people donated money ranging from $5 to $25 to help Briskman, who lost her job as a marketing and communications specialist for Virginia-based federal contractor, Akima, as a consequence for her action.

The incident happened on Oct. 28, when Trump was heading out after playing a round of golf at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Northern Virginia.

As the president's convoy passed her bicycle, Briskman said she offered the gesture in an instinctive reaction to Trump’s policies.

A photographer with the presidential convoy — which included many journalists from different news organizations — snapped Briskman’s picture, which led to a massive frenzy on social media where Briskman was hailed as a hero.

"Juli Briskman is an inspiration to us all. This week we learned that she was fired from her employer for exercising her first amendment rights,” wrote Mellow on the donation page supporting Briskman.

The other GoFundMe page created by Stephen Gregar said, "When I found out that her employment was terminated for exercising her First Amendment right to free speech I was infuriated."

As of writing this report, Mello's donation page had made $96,675 while Gregar's page had made $2,358.

Replying to Mello's message on the donation page, Briskman said she didn’t imagine that she would lose her job because of what she did and the actions of her company towards firing her were “swift and unexpected.”

“How would I pay for healthcare? How much money do I have in my savings to cover our mortgage and general living expenses in Northern Virginia and how long will it last? How long will it take to land another job?” Briskman wrote.

Regardless of the consequences, Briskman's action was highly lauded by the Twitter folk and many people showed their support after she lost her job.

In an interview with Huffpost, Briskman described the way in which she was fired by her company. “They said, 'we’re separating from you,'” she said. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene,’” she added.

What's interesting was the fact that one of Briskman's male employees got to keep his job even after posting offensive comments on Facebook while she was fired, the Huffpost reported. She stated that her colleague published the comment "a f------ Libtard a------" and also had a cover picture of Akima on his Facebook page; but he was allowed to delete the post and keep his job.

In her message to the donators, she thanked them and said that through these donations many “heavy burdens have been lifted.”