Donald Trump, embroiled in a long-running legal battle with former students of his defunct Trump University, has been accused in recently filed court papers of threatening to financially ruin the woman who is a lead plaintiff in the suit. Trump’s comments, according to the filings, came in a secret deposition he gave just two months ago, on Dec. 10 — the same day he was making international headlines over his pledge to ban Muslim immigrants from the country.
The accusation was made in a motion by the woman — Tarla Makaeff, a California yoga instructor — to withdraw as lead plaintiff, asserting she has been “put through the wringer” by Trump and his lawyers and forced to “suffer daily with the fear that she could be bankrupted by Trump.”
Exactly what Trump said in his December deposition is unclear. The transcript is sealed and the excerpt cited by Makaeff’s lawyers was blacked out in the copy of the filing obtained by Yahoo News. The motion in support of Makaeff’s effort to back out of the suit claims she needs protection “from further retaliation” by the billionaire, who is leading in the polls for the Republican nomination for president.
The underlying class action lawsuit, filed in 2010, charges that Makaeff and thousands of other students were “scammed” into maxing out their credit cards and paying up to $60,000 in fees for seminars in hotel ballrooms and “mentoring” by Trump’s “hand-picked” real estate experts. The lawsuit against the school, which is no longer in business, alleges the seminars turned into little more than an “infomercial” and the Trump mentors she was assigned offered “no practical advice” and “mostly disappeared.” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a separate suit in 2013 alleging fraud on the part of the “university,” which was never an accredited institution and awarded no degrees.
Trump’s lawyers have vigorously denied the claims and vowed to contest both suits.
“None of it is true. No one was defrauded,” said Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, in an interview about the fraud cases last summer. “The people that take these classes go into it with their eyes open. A lot of people did very well with [Trump University.] A lot of people enjoyed it. But, like everything else, if people don’t put the effort into it [they don’t succeed].”
Trump’s new lead lawyer against Makaeff, Donald Petrocelli, best known for representing one of the murder victims in a civil suit against O.J. Simpson, declined to answer any questions about the deposition when reached Thursday by Yahoo News. “I don’t think the lawyers should be talking about the case,” Petrocelli said.
A lawyer for Makaeff, who, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a Los Angeles yoga instructor and former model, also declined comment. A “protective order” in the five-year-old case allows either party to keep testimony and documents in the case under seal.
Trump has made little secret of his inclination to strike back hard — on the campaign trail and in the courts — against anybody who opposes him. But the secret deposition in the San Diego case calls attention to the danger that a Trump presidency could turn into what one lawyer who has sued Trump called a “litigation circus” in which a sitting president would be forced to submit to multiple depositions and even jury trials as a result of ongoing civil lawsuits.
By Michael Isikoff.
Culled from Yahoo News.
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