Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump once called an opposing lawyer “disgusting” after she tried to take a break to pump breast milk, a new report says.
The remarks came during a break in questioning by lawyer Elizabeth Beck during a 2011 deposition, The New York Times reported. Trump’s testimony stemmed from a lawsuit over a failed real estate project in Florida.
Beck, along with her co-counsel and husband Jared Beck, represented clients who claimed they lost tens of thousands of dollars each.
But after Beck insisted on taking a break for an hour to pump breast milk for her 3-month-old daughter, Trump said, “You’re disgusting,” the Times reported, drawing on a letter Jared Beck wrote at the time.
Trump attorney Alan Garten did not dispute the remark, but insisted in a comment to the Times that it “was in no way a statement about her decision to breast-feed or pump.”
“It was solely the fact that she was appearing to do it in the middle of a deposition,” Garten said. “In my 20 years of legal practice, I’ve never seen more bizarre behavior at a deposition. That is what led to his remark.”
Garten told the Times that “every accommodation” had been made for Beck to take breaks, and that he suspected she was trying to buy time to come up with new questions for Trump.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN the campaign has “nothing to add beyond what Alan Garten stated in the (New York Times) story at this time.”
The breast-pumping incident wasn’t the only time Trump insulted the attorney during the deposition.
“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 “you’re 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.