Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump once called a lawyer who requested a break from a 2011 deposition to pump breast milk “disgusting” before ending his testimony and leaving the room.
“He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there,” Beck told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Wednesday morning, calling it “an absolute meltdown.”
The incident was described in a letter from Jared Beck, Elizabeth’s co-counsel and husband, obtained by CNN and first reported Tuesday by the New York Times.
Trump’s attorney Allen Garten, who was present for the deposition, does not dispute that Trump called Beck “disgusting.”
Trump slammed Beck’s interview in a tweet to CNN Politics on Wednesday morning:
“Lawyer Elizabeth Beck did a terrible job against me, she lost (I even got legal fees). I loved beating her,she was easy,” he tweeted.
Alan Garten, executive vice president and general counsel at The Trump Organization, did not dispute the remark, but said Trump called Beck “disgusting” because she was about to use her breast pump in the middle of the deposition room.
“She was disgusting,” Garten said in a phone interview with CNN. “She was attempting to breast feed — to pump in the middle of a deposition, in a deposition room with five lawyers and was not excusing herself.”
Garten said Beck started to assemble the pump in the deposition room and “started to move the breast pump toward her breast.”
Garten insisted that Trump and his legal team left the room “to give her privacy” and called Beck’s behavior unprofessional.
And he claimed Beck orchestrated the stunt because “she ran out of questions and she didn’t know what to do.”
“This is not about breastfeeding … it’s just not,” Garten insisted.
Beck painted a very different picture, saying Trump was the one whose behavior was “unprofessional” and displayed a “lack of self-control.”
Beck insisted that the breast-pumping break was set to coincide with a pre-scheduled lunch break at 12:30, but that Trump decided at the last minute he did not want a break.
Garten disputed that, insisting the only pre-scheduled break was one set for 3 p.m. for Beck to pump breast milk privately in a separate room.
“What kind of a leader of the United States would that be? Is he going to behave that way when he’s negotiating treaties with China or Russia?” she said.
Trump’s testimony stemmed from a lawsuit over a failed real estate project in Florida in which the Becks represented clients who claimed they lost tens of thousands of dollars each.
The breast-pumping incident wasn’t the only time Trump insulted the attorney during the deposition, according to transcripts obtained by the New York Times.
“Do you even know what you’re doing?” he asked her at one point, according to the Times.
In the end, the Becks lost one of their cases against Mr. Trump and are appealing, the newspaper said.
News of the “disgusting” remark came on the heels of another rhetorical controversy swirling around Trump.
Facing questions about a decades-old rape accusation against Trump, one of his top aides and attorneys Michael Cohen told the Daily Beast that legally “you cannot rape your spouse.” In fact, marital rape has been illegal in all 50 states for more than two decades.
Cohen apologized Tuesday for the remark, calling his comments “inarticulate” but insisting that he had been enraged by the reporter’s “gall” to ask a question about the accusation.
The rape claim stems from an accusation Trump’s then-wife Ivana Trump leveled at her husband during divorce proceedings in the early 1990s, an allegation she walked back Tuesday.