Woman arrested after trying to reach Trump at New York fraud trial
Court employee now barred from state facilities
NEW YORK — A woman was arrested Wednesday after she stood up at former president Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial and walked toward the front of the courtroom where he was sitting.
The woman, later identified as a court employee, retreated after a court officer told her to return to her seat. A short time later, officers escorted the woman out of the Manhattan courtroom and arrested her. She was charged with contempt of court for disrupting a court proceeding, state court spokesperson Lucian Chalfen said.
Chalfen said the woman had been yelling out to Trump that she wanted to help, though reporters in the courtroom did not hear her raise her voice. She was later heard screaming in the courthouse lobby as officers removed her from the building.
“None of the parties were ever in any danger,” Chalfen said.
The woman, whom Chalfen did not name, works in a different state courthouse. She has been placed on administrative leave and barred from entering state court facilities pending an investigation, Chalfen said.
The trial went on, albeit with one other disruption — this one after Trump threw up his hands in frustration and grumbled to his lawyers while a witness was testifying against him.
Judge Arthur Engoron warned Trump and others involved in the case to keep their voices down after the 2024 Republican front-runner conferred animatedly with his lawyers at the defense table during real estate appraiser Doug Larson’s second day of testimony.
State lawyer Kevin Wallace asked Engoron to ask the defense to “stop commenting during the witness’s testimony,” adding that the “exhortations” were audible on the witness’s side of the room. The judge then asked everyone to keep their voices down, “particularly if it’s meant to influence the testimony.”
Trump was in court for a second straight day Wednesday, diverting from Iowa, New Hampshire, and other campaign haunts to give close attention to the case threatening to upend his real estate empire and his wealthy businessman image. Trump attended the first three days, but skipped last week. On Tuesday, he left early to give a deposition in an unrelated lawsuit.
In a pretrial decision last month, Engoron ruled that Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, committed years of fraud by exaggerating his asset values and net worth on annual financial statements used to make deals and get better terms on loans and insurance.
As punishment, Engoron ordered that a court-appointed receiver take control of some Trump companies, putting the future oversight of Trump Tower and other marquee properties in question, but an appeals court has blocked that for now.
Trump didn’t talk about the case on his way into court past TV cameras Wednesday, saving his usual vitriol for a morning break.
Inside the courtroom, which is closed to cameras, Trump grew irritated as Larson testified. Trump’s lawyers were seeking to undercut the state’s claims that his top corporate deputies played games to inflate the values of his properties and pad his bottom line.
In a series of questions, Trump lawyer Lazaro Fields sought to establish that Larson had, at one point, undershot the projected 2015 value of a Trumpowned Wall Street office building by $114 million. Larson said the “values were not wrong — it’s what we knew at the time.”
Trump threw up his hands during the exchange.
On Tuesday, Larson testified that he never consulted with or gave permission for the Trump Organization’s former controller, Jeffrey McConney, to cite him as an outside expert in the valuation spreadsheets he used to create Trump’s financial statements.
Fields on Wednesday accused Larson of lying, pointing to a decade-old email exchange between McConney and the appraiser.
That touched off an angry back-and-forth between the defense and state sides, with Trump lawyer Christopher Kise suggesting that Larson could risk perjuring himself and needed to be advised about his rights against self-incrimination. State lawyer Colleen Faherty called Kise’s comments “witness intimidation.”
After Larson was escorted out of the courtroom, Kise insisted that he was trying to protect the witness’a rights, while state lawyer Kevin Wallace complained that the defense was mounting “a performance” for the media. Ultimately, Engoron allowed Larson to return and answer the question with no legal warning. Larson said he didn’t recall the email.
Asked again whether he understood that McConney had asked for his input in order to carry out valuations, a weary Larson said: “That’s what it appears.”