A federal judge has forced Former President Donald Trump to choose between attending a trial to determine damages against him due to the loss of a previous lawsuit brought by accuser E. Jean Carroll, or the funeral of his wife’s mother, Amalija Knavs, who died last week at the age of 78.
“And we would have assumed that for a trial like this, it’s not an emergency in terms of timing, the judge would have been very nice, and they would let me go because I want to be at every trial day because I saw what happened in the first one where I was asked not to go by the lawyers,” Trump, 77, said at a news conference Wednesday, according to Fox News.
It was not to be because, according to a pair of social media posts from the former president, the judge overseeing the case “suffers from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“The Judge, angrily, and somewhat surprisingly, said NO, you can go to the trial, or you can go to the funeral, but not both,” Trump explained in the second of a pair of connected posts.
“He is abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial but, that’s the way this crooked system works!” he added.
Trump told reporters at Wednesday news conference that “the judge is a radical Trump hater,” which is one of the reasons the former president wanted to attend every day of the trial.
He was referring to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a senior U.S. district judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and is presiding over the case.
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Kaplan was nominated to the district court by then-President Bill Clinton in 1994 and confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate later that year. He has been a senior judge since 2011.
“That’s a nasty man,” Trump said of Kaplan during the news conference. “He’s a nasty judge. He’s a Trump-hating guy. And it’s obvious to everybody in the court it’s a disgrace, frankly, what’s happening. It’s a disgrace.”
The funeral for Knavs was scheduled for Thursday at The Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, not far from Mar-a-Lago, according to the Independent, which noted that Donald and Melania Trump were married at the same church in 2005.
The Independent confirmed that Trump would be attending the funeral rather than his own trial in New York.
Trump has already been ordered to pay $5 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, but Carroll is looking for another $10 million in compensatory damages and “millions more in punitive damages,” Fox reported.
Testimony was scheduled to begin in that case Wednesday.
“Carroll, 79, alleged that Trump raped her at the Bergdorf Goodman department store across the street from Trump Tower in Manhattan sometime in 1996,” Fox reported. “According to Carroll, the two had a chance run-in at the store, where Trump was shopping for a gift for ‘a girl.’ She said he asked for her advice, and the two shopped together before he pushed her into a dressing room and assaulted her.”
Trump has strongly and publicly denied the accusation, essentially calling Carroll a liar, which led to the defamation suit.
“It is a continuation of the greatest political witch hunt in history,” Trump told Fox after the initial verdict in the case found him liable.
Trump told Fox at the time that he had “absolutely no idea who this woman is.”
