Roberta Kaplan onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit 2018 at Ritz Carlton Hotel on October 2, 2018 in Laguna Niguel, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Fortune)
Famed US lawyer Roberta Kaplan – an expert in commercial litigation and public interest matters – has accused former president Donald Trump of using a coded version of the C-word against her.
Roberta Kaplan – who also goes by Robbie – recently represented magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in her defamation case against Trump.
A jury in the case took just three hours to decide that ex-president Donald Trump must pay advice columnist E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019, when he denied her allegations of sexual assault and said “people should pay dearly for such false accusations”.
Carroll’s payout represents $18.3m in compensation, plus $65m in punitive retribution over defamatory statements that Trump made against her. Those were in addition to an award of $5m that the 2024 Republican White House nominee was ordered to pay in May after being found liable for sexually abusing Carroll.
Trump, who stormed out of the Manhattan courtroom before the verdict was read, took to the Truth Social app to rage against the decision, saying:
“Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party.”
Roberta Kaplan, who is a lesbian and who married her wife Rachel Lavine in September 2005, says that the ex-president directed a childish ‘See you next Tuesday’ remark at her after a deposition in unrelated case at Mar-a-Lago – before the E. Jean Carroll case took place.
The phrase is a well-known, thinly veiled code for the insult ‘c**t’.
Speaking on the George Conway Explains It All podcast on Friday (2 February), Roberta Kaplan explained that the incident happened at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an unrelated, since-dismissed case in which the ex-president faced accusations of collaborating with a fraudulent marketing company.
She explained that Trump’s attorneys ensured the two sides were no longer on the record before he looked at her and remarked: “See you next Tuesday.”
Kaplan added that she hadn’t actually understood the meaning of the comment, telling the podcast: “I, thank God, had no idea what that meant, so I said to him, ‘What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday.’ Literally, it was an honest answer. I had no idea what he’s talking about.”
Kaplan says that her colleagues then explained to her her what Trump had meant once they were all in their car driving away from Trump’s property.
“That is a teenage boy-level joke,” opined the podcast’s co-host, Sarah Longwell.
Kaplan replied: “Had I known, I for sure would have gotten angry… I looked like I was being above it all, which I wasn’t. I just did not know.”
The story didn’t end there, however. Roberta Kaplan went on to tell the podcast hosts that Trump had also thrown a temper tantrum that day when his legal team offered to provide lunch to the lawyer and her associates.
“There was a huge pile of documents, exhibits, sitting in front of him, and he took the pile and he just threw it across the table – and stormed out of the room,” Kaplan claimed.