Former US President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower for Manhattan federal court for the second defamation trial against him, in New York City on January 17, 2024.
Charly Triballeau | AFP | Getty Images
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 trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The tense exchange, which Trump was in court to witness, came shortly before the writer E. Jean Carroll was called to the stand to testify.
Carroll 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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