Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who has taken on several cases against former President Trump, says Trump once had an outburst because his legal team offered her lunch at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during a deposition.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re here in Mar-a-Lago. What do you think you’re going to do for lunch? Where are you going to get lunch?’” Kaplan, who represented Trump sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll, said during a podcast released this week.
Kaplan said she told him that his legal team had “graciously” offered to provide her team lunch at the Palm Beach club that Trump calls home.
“At which point there was a huge pile of documents, exhibits, sitting in front of him, and he took the pile and he just threw it across the table. And stormed out of the room,” Kaplan told podcast hosts George Conway and Sarah Longwell, both Republicans who are vocal Trump critics.
Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million last week in a defamation case against Trump, adding to $5 million previously awarded in a previous case that found the former president liable for sexual assault. Trump has denied he assaulted the writer.
The Mar-a-Lago deposition was for an unrelated case against Trump.
Kaplan recalled that after the lunch break, the former president returned to the deposition room and asked Kaplan how the food was.
“And I said, ‘Well, sir, I had a banana. You know, I can never really eat when I’m taking testimony.’ And he said, ‘Well, I told you,’ — it was kind of charming. He said, ‘I told you, I told them to make you really bad sandwiches, but they can’t help themselves here. We have the best sandwiches,'” Kaplan said.
The deposition was for a class action lawsuit filed over a marketing scheme that capitalized off of the reality show “The Apprentice.” The case was dismissed.
Kaplan said at the end of the deposition, she believes Trump used a euphemism to insult her as she left.
“I say, ‘I’m done asking questions’ and immediately I hear from the other side, ‘Off the record. Off the record. Off the record,’ so they must have planned it. And he looks at me from across the table and he says, ‘See you next Tuesday,’” Kaplan said.
“See you next Tuesday” is slang for the c-word, as a sort of acronym using sounds and first letters of each word: “See you N T.”
Kaplan said she wasn’t aware of the phrase at the time and was confused because their next meeting was scheduled for a Wednesday.
“I wasn’t in on the joke, so I had no idea,” she said. “We get into the car and my colleagues are like, ‘Robbie, do you know what that means?’ and I’m like, ‘No, what are you talking about?’ They tell me, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ Thank God I didn’t know because had I known, I for sure would have gotten angry.”
Kaplan also represented Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, in a dismissed case accusing her uncle of fraud and misappropriated inheritance.
Kaplan described the Carroll verdict, which Trump is expected to appeal, as her most significant career achievement.
“I spent my whole life devoted to the principle that we have a rule of law and we have a judicial system that works,” she said. “And that’s what makes us a constitutional democracy, that’s — at least until recently — was to be admired worldwide. And it was starting, I mean, it is in times looking like that may not be true.”
Updated: 1:26 p.m.