Left: Attorney Roberta leaves federal court in New York during the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case against Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews). Right: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik).
A longtime legal thorn in Donald Trump’s side says that the former president said words that amount to a euphemism for a derogatory and sexist insult during a deposition in a 2018 lawsuit over an alleged “pyramid scheme” Trump ran, along with family members, dating back to his reality TV days.
Attorney Roberta Kaplan told staunch never-Trumper George Conway that the former president told her, “See you next Tuesday” during a deposition at Mar-a-Lago. Kaplan also said that Trump became incensed with his lawyer Alina Habba after she gave Kaplan a sandwich for lunch.
CNN reported Friday that in a recently-recorded episode of podcast “George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell),” Kaplan spoke to the host about the president’s behavior during the deposition he once called “a waste of [his] time.”
Kaplan said that during a deposition for a fraud case that accused Trump of lending his name to a pyramid scheme through endorsements on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” the former president chastised Habba for offering Kaplan lunch. Kaplan, who also represents writer E. Jean Carroll in her successful sexual abuse and defamation cases against the former president — which have ended in multimillion dollar verdicts — said that the Trump team had “graciously offered to provide” her team with lunch as is often a courtesy practice between opposing counsel.
Later, however, Kaplan said that Trump asked her, “Well, how’d you like the lunch?” and taunted, “I told them to make you really bad sandwiches, but they can’t help themselves here. We have the best sandwiches.”
Kaplan said Trump then threw a huge pile of documents and exhibits across the table and stormed out of the room, then turned to his own attorney and yelled at her.
“He really yelled at Alina for that. He was so mad at Alina,” Kaplan said on the podcast.
Kaplan scored an $83.3M verdict against Trump last week for defaming her client E. Jean Carroll after Kaplan won Carroll’s rape and defamation case against the former president. In that case, Trump stormed out of the courtroom during Kaplan’s closing arguments, then posted on social media in continued attacks on Carroll.
Meanwhile, the presiding judge warned Habba: “You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup. Now, sit down.” Trump has since said he is looking for new counsel as he appeals the Carroll verdict.
In a separate anecdote during the podcast, Kaplan said that as Trump concluded the deposition, his lawyers ordered the court reporter off the record. Then, she said, Trump leaned across the table and said, “See you next Tuesday” to her.
Kaplan said it appeared that Trump and his attorneys had planned the opportunity for him to make the comment, and that she was initially confused by the statement as their next meeting had been scheduled for a Wednesday.
“You could tell it was like, it was like a kind of a joke again, like teenage boys would come up with. But again, I wasn’t in on the joke,” she recalled.
Later, Kaplan said that her colleagues explained that the phrase generally means an insult toward women and she said, “thank God I didn’t know because had I known, I for sure would have gotten angry.”
The lawsuit was dismissed for jurisdictional reasons earlier this month, although Kaplan told CNN that she intends to pursue the claims in state courts.
Trump is certainly not the first person to use the phrase inappropriately during legal proceedings. In 2022, California lawyer Timothy Scott used the phrase during a hearing. Like Kaplan, the judge in Scott’s case was not initially aware of the phrase’s derogatory meaning. When the judge became aware, however, he slammed the lawyer for trying to deceive the court. Scott was later the subject of a disciplinary complaint for his conduct.
American Bar Association disciplinary rules prohibit attorneys from participating in conduct that is discriminatory on the basis of sex. Generally, the use of sex-based insults is considered discriminatory.
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