Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who most recently represented E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump, recounted in a podcast interview released Friday that the former president got angry during a deposition after he learned that his lawyers agreed to provide her lunch and in a separate moment invoked a vulgar term.
Kaplan recalled her interaction with Trump during an episode of the “George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell)” podcast. The deposition was held at Mar-a-Lago during which she said Trump argued over whether they should take a lunch break, with him advocating they should continue working straight through.
"This is a waste of my time," Kaplan quoted Trump as saying.
Kaplan said she then saw Trump's "wheels spinning in his brain" and he asked her what she would do for lunch since she was at Mar-a-Lago, an estate on an island removed from commercial areas.
"So I said to him, 'Well, you know, I raised this question with your attorneys yesterday, sir, and they graciously offered to provide us with lunch.' 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," Kaplan said.
She added, "He really yelled at Alina for that. He was so mad at Alina," referring to Trump's lawyer Alina Habba.
After they resumed the deposition following lunch, Kaplan said Trump asked her how she liked her meal.
"I said, 'Well, sir, I had a banana. You know, I can never really eat when I'm taking testimony," said Kaplan, who then said Trump 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.'"
During the episode, George Conway, a fierce critic of Trump and a lawyer himself, noted that it's customary for opposing legal teams to offer lunch to each other.
At the end of the deposition, Kaplan said that Trump's lawyers asked to go "off the record," meaning what he said would not be included on the court deposition transcript. Kaplan said Trump then said to her: “See you next Tuesday,” a slang term referring to a word for female genitalia used as an insult for women.
Kaplan said she didn't know what the slang term meant and it wasn't until her colleagues informed her afterward.
"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. There’s no question I would have gotten angry,” Kaplan said.
Requests for comment were not immediately returned by an aide for Trump or Habba.
In Carroll's case against Trump, a jury last month found that the former president owes Carroll more than $83 million in damages for defamation.
