MANHATTAN (CN) — A former aide to Donald Trump can proceed with her civil rape case against Trump’s longtime senior campaign adviser Jason Miller, a New York judge ruled Friday.
The lawsuit is an escalation of a yearslong and salacious feud between Miller and former MAGA attorney A.J. Delgado, who claims that she was victimized in her publicized extramarital affair with the close Trump strategist.
In the lawsuit, filed in 2023 in New York County Supreme Court, Delgado claims that Miller subjected her to a “cycle of coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment and sex trafficking” while she was his direct subordinate in the first Trump campaign.
Delgado also names Trump’s presidential campaign and Jamestown Associates LLC, a public affairs firm that employed Miller, as defendants in the complaint. In his Friday ruling, New York Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank greenlit Delgado’s rape claims against Miller and a negligent hiring claim against Trump’s presidential campaign. But the judge dismissed all causes of action against Jamestown, and the sex trafficking claims against Miller were axed, too.
All of the defendants had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed during a court hearing on Jan. 29, when they argued that Delgado’s claims were time-barred and inadequately pleaded.
“There was no factual detail whatsoever,” Michael Madaio, an attorney for Trump’s presidential campaign, told the court of Delgado’s complaint. “She didn’t mention a date and offered little to no details about the alleged assaults.”
Frank disagreed, ruling Friday that Delgado’s complaint “adequately alleged sexual assault incidents in New York.” He added that the defense’s argument that Delgado’s claims were time-barred was “unavailing.”
In a statement to Courthouse News on Friday, Miller called the accusations “completely false” and “disproven” by Delgado’s past statements. He called her lawsuit the latest in a series of public attacks that date back more than eight years.
“History has shown a pattern of conduct by A.J. Delgado intended to harass my family and drive a wedge between me and the son we share, all because I chose to stay with my wife and work to repair our marriage,” Miller said. “…This is nothing more than an attempt to simultaneously extort and destroy me because A.J. Delgado didn’t get picked. I pray for my son every day for what she is subjecting him to.”
An attorney for Delgado didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Once a prominent adviser and a spokeswoman for Trump, Delgado made rounds on national media during the 2016 election cycle to defend the now-president against his own accusations of sexual misconduct.
Now “proudly anti-Trump,” according to her X bio, Delgado claims that Miller hired her specifically for her looks after gushing over an Instagram photo of her in a bikini. At work, she said that “while Miller would continuously make flirtatious or suggestive remarks to Delgado, Delgado would often ignore, pivot, or pretend she did not hear such.”
Miller’s behavior supposedly took a dark turn on Oct. 18, 2016, the day before Trump’s presidential debate against Hillary Clinton at the University of Nevada, Delgado claims. That night, Delgado said Miller plied her with alcohol at a Las Vegas nightclub before directing her and another staffer back to his hotel room “to discuss and prep for the debates” — only for the other staffer to “abruptly” excuse herself for the night.
“The next morning, Delgado awoke in the bedroom portion of the suite, partially dressed, with her jumpsuit hanging around her ankle, what appeared to be vomit on the side of her pillow, and one of her high heels on the bed,” Delgado claims. “There was evidence that Miller had had penetrative sex with her in her hotel suite, relations that were not consented to by Delgado, and Delgado was fully unable to consent to any sexual relations.”
Delgado claims that incident was the start of a persistent predatory relationship between the two, in which Miller, who was married, repeatedly “insisted on having sexual relations with Delgado.” Delgado said she was “unable to refuse” because of the power imbalance.
“Delgado had no choice but to feign interest, out of fear that rejecting Miller would have disastrous repercussions for her White House job and even for any position at all within the general Trump orbit,” she said in the suit.
One of the sexual encounters, at the Trump Doral-Miami resort, resulted in Delgado’s pregnancy — which later sparked an ugly custody dispute and accusations from Delgado that Miller refused to pay child support.
Delgado filed the 2023 complaint under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that gave sexual abuse survivors a one-year lookback window between 2022 and 2023 to pursue their purported assailants outside of the typical statute of limitations. The law ultimately resulted in more than 3,000 complaints, many of them being against high-profile defendants. including Bill Cosby and Trump himself.