After the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes opened for play in 2005, Donald Trump insisted on several occasions that only attractive women be allowed to work in the clubhouse restaurant, it was reported today.
When Trump came visiting, the club’s managers went on alert and scheduled young, thin, pretty women to work the restaurant because when Trump saw less-attractive women working at his club he wanted them fired, according to court records cited by the Los Angeles Times.
“I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were ‘not pretty enough’ and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, who was director of catering at the club until 2008, said in a sworn declaration cited by the newspaper.
Initially, Trump gave this command almost every time he visited, Strozier said. Managers eventually changed employee schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club,” she said.
The comments came in a lawsuit over a lack of meal and rest breaks at Trump’s golf club. Several employees said managers staffed Trump’s clubhouse restaurant with attractive young women rather than more experienced employees in order to please Trump.
A Trump Organization attorney, in a statement to The Times, called the allegations “meritless.”
The bulk of the lawsuit was settled in 2013, when golf course management, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $475,000 to employees who had complained about break policies, The Times reported. An employee’s claim that she was fired after complaining about the company’s treatment of women was settled separately; its terms remain confidential.
