In the lawsuit, the woman, Alva Johnson, who is black, also accused the president’s campaign of discriminating against her by paying her less than her white and male colleagues.
She joins more than a dozen other women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, Trump kissed Johnson without her consent Aug. 24, 2016, in Tampa as he got out of a recreational vehicle during a campaign stop.
The encounter began when Johnson, who was in the RV, spoke with Trump as he made his way to the door of the vehicle, according to the suit. She told him that she had spent months on the road working for him and offered words of encouragement.
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Trump then shook her hand, promised he wouldn’t forget her and leaned in “close enough that she could feel his breath on her skin,” according to her lawsuit. As soon as she realized what was happening, it states, Johnson turned her head, but Trump still kissed her on the corner of the mouth.
“It was distressing to her,” Hassan Zavareei, Johnson’s lawyer, said Monday. “Shortly afterwards, she called her significant other and her parents to tell them what had happened and was very upset and was in tears.”
All three confirmed to The Washington Post and The New Yorker that Johnson had told them about the encounter at the time.
White House officials disputed the account.
“This accusation is absurd on its face,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
According to the suit, two campaign officials, Karen Giorno and Pam Bondi, the Florida attorney general at the time, walked out of the vehicle after Trump. Neither seemed to acknowledge what had happened at the time, according to Johnson’s account, and both denied witnessing inappropriate behavior to The New Yorker and The Post.
The president’s re-election campaign also denied the discrimination claim had merit.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.