Fiona Hill, a former adviser to ex-US President Donald Trump, has revealed that she was given a racist nickname by the officials in the previous administration. Hill worked as a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council in the Trump White House.

“I discovered that I was known as the Russia bitch. This underscored that fact that most women were not paid attention to,” Hill told CNN during an interview.

“And the recent statement by the former President that he doesn’t know me at all again underscores the misogyny that if you are a woman, or a certain kind of woman that’s not in the immediate entourage, then you are pretty much nothing. You are a non-player in his world,” she added.

In her recently released memoir “There is nothing for you here”, Hill said that for Trump and those around him, it was all about the look, the image, not who you were and what you did.

She rose to prominence in November 2019, while testifying at the Trump impeachment hearings. She warned warned Republicans against promoting the “fictional narrative” that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 US elections.

Hill was among the two witnesses who testified before the house intelligence committee, which conducted the first leg of the impeachment inquiry against Trump.

Hill, a British-born coal miner’s daughter who became a US citizen in 2002, worked for Republican and Democratic administrations. She said she joined the Trump White House because she shared the Republican president’s belief that relations with Russia needed to improve. Still, she was adamant that Russia was gearing up to intervene again in the 2020 US election.

Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led US House of Representatives over charges he abused the power of his office by enlisting a foreign government to investigate a political rival ahead of the 2020 election and obstructed Congress in its investigation. He was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.

(With inputs from agencies)