Former President Donald Trump again attended his defamation trial on Wednesday, making several lengthy posts on Truth Social to blast the judge and case and explain his upcoming absence while he attends his mother-in-law’s funeral.
After the court adjourned, he held a press conference at the Trump Building in New York to give an update about the case and criticize the judge for not delaying trial on Thursday.
“The first lady’s mother passed away, the funeral is tomorrow, and we would’ve assumed for a trial like this it’s not an emergency in terms of timing,” he said.
“The judge, it would’ve been very nice, could have let me go, because I want to be at every trial day because I saw what happened to the first one,” he added.
This case is one of two brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who in 2019 made public allegations that President Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. When President Trump, then still in office, publicly denied the allegations and said he did not know Ms. Carroll and suggested she was seeking publicity, she sued him for defamation. He has maintained that he has had nothing to do with Ms. Carroll.
Last May, Ms. Carroll was awarded $5 million after a jury found President Trump liable for “sexual battery.” After that, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in a summary judgment that President Trump was liable for
President Trump said his lawyers had advised him not to attend the first trial because it was a “demeaning” event.
“There was no evidence, there was no anything. And so I didn’t go,” he said. “And I understood exactly what he meant when he said it was demeaning—”There is no reason to go and you shouldn’t go —and I decided, on this one, same judge, same judge, he’s a radical Trump hater. I said I will go to all days.”
On social media, he had written he felt “an obligation to be at every moment of this ridiculous trial” because of the judge, who he claimed was “extraordinarily hostile” to his side during his absence.
