What’s it like to sue Donald J. Trump? Just ask Roberta Kaplan; she’s done it twice. Kaplan was E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer in her two — and counting! — defamation suits against the former president. Shortly after the latest case ended with Trump forced to fork over a cool $83 million, Kaplan opened up about her experiences in a new chat with New York, during which she revealed her secret to driving an already tetchy guy totally bonkers.
Kaplan spent much of the interview talking about Trump’s deposition, which didn’t go swimmingly. (More on that in a bit.) At day’s end, before they parted ways, Trump’s team asked if he could say something off the record. “You could tell that they kind of had a joke about it,” she said.
It’s at this point that the 45th president looked up at Kaplan and said, “See you next Tuesday.”
Do you get it? If you don’t have a trash brain, you may not. Kaplan didn’t get it:
And so I said to him, “What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday.” Which was when the Carroll deposition was. And then I didn’t know anything until we got in the car, and my colleague — who is much younger and hipper — said to me, “Robbie, you know what that means?” And I said “no.” They told me, and I said, “Oh my God. I’m so glad.” Because I would not have kept my equanimity.
For those who still don’t get it, Trump called Kaplan the c-word.
Kaplan also discussed his antics before he dropped a sexist insult. Trump, she said, “couldn’t really control himself.” He’d hit them with a “constant barrage” of insults, mostly to Carroll, who wasn’t even in the room, but also to Kaplan. For instance, at one point he reiterated his claim that Carroll is “not his type,” only to tell Kaplan that neither is she.
“He told me that he was gonna sue me very strongly, whatever that means,” she recalled. “He told me that I was a disgrace, et cetera, et cetera.”
Kaplan admitted that she’s “not someone who’s known for their equanimity.” And yet she was able to suppress her inner beast:
I knew it was important to stay calm. And so I just did. I just let him keep saying it, and he would kinda go off. He does this a lot in all the different cases. He kind of goes on a tirade, like, he speechifies in answering questions — which is never what you want your client to do. And I would just kind of look up after a while, and I would say to him, “Are you done yet? Because I have another question to ask.” Which, of course, drove him completely insane.
Kaplan added that it “took a lot of impulse control on my part, but I managed.”
Trump, of course, wasn’t much better behaved in court, which Kaplan thinks may have been intentional, as though he wanted to lose to gain even more pity votes. That or may not be true, but since Trump’s reportedly planning to act up even more during his Jan. 6 trial, it probably is.
(Via New York)