A New York federal judge snapped at a lawyer for Donald Trump on Wednesday after she again asked for a delay in his sex assault defamation trial so the former president could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral
“I said sit down!” Judge Lewis Kaplan told Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba.
Habba replied, “I don’t like to be spoken [to] like that … I will not speak to you like that.”
Kaplan shot back, “It is denied. Sit down.”
The judge several times has rejected Habba’s request for a delay in the civil trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The tense exchange, which Trump was in court to see, came shortly before the writer E. Jean Carroll was called to the witness stand to testify on the trial’s second day.
Carroll, who was the first witness in the case, says Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in a New York City department store.
The case will determine the monetary damages Trump must pay Carroll for defamatory statements he made about her in 2019 while president and later when he denied her allegations.
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