WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign has reached a settlement in a long-running fight over its nondisclosure agreements that would free potentially hundreds of ex-staffers, contractors and volunteers to say what they want to about their experience.
The settlement comes after years of litigation between the 2016 campaign and former staffer Jessica Denson, who won a ruling in 2021 that the nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements she signed were unenforceable. Denson and her lawyers were trying to certify the case as a class action for at least 422 people the campaign had identified as signing identical contracts.
The case only dealt with the 2016 campaign, but court decisions over the years would have served as a warning for similarly broad confidentiality agreements. A federal judge in Manhattan held that the language in the Trump campaign agreements, which restricted what staffers could say about Trump, his family and his businesses, were too vague, ill-defined and “unduly burdensome.”
