Ivanka Trump’s Attorney Asks Judge to Think of the Children

Wednesday is hump day, famously. It’s that midweek push where you just gotta grit your teeth, send the kids off to school, fly to New York from Florida, testify in your dad and brother’s civil fraud trial about what you knew and when you knew it, and just hold on until the weekend. As today proves, it’ll be Fri-yay soon enough.

Ivanka Trump, as a parent who has long worked and traveled all over the world—including over weekdays!—in her capacity as one of her father’s senior advisers during his one-term presidency, surely understands the idea of white-knuckling until the weekend. But as her lawyer argued in an appeal filed Thursday, “Ms. Trump, who resides in Florida with her three minor children, will suffer undue hardship if a stay is denied and she is required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week, in a case she has already been dismissed from, before her appeal is heard.” 

It did not work. She’s still scheduled to testify on Wednesday, November 8. 

Besides asking the judge to think of the kids, Trump’s counsel has tried a few other things to protect her from having to testify, namely arguing that she hasn’t lived or worked in New York since 2017, and so its civil court doesn’t have the jurisdiction to compel her testimony. But Judge Arthur Engoron previously pointed to documents saying she had business ties and property in Manhattan.

“Ms. Trump has clearly availed herself of the privilege of doing business in New York,” Engoron wrote in a filing last week.

Can’t a person keep a pied-á-terre or two in the city without it meaning they have to take the stand in a civil fraud case anymore? If we keep this up, if we keep compelling everyone who has at least one apartment in the city to testify in cases in which they’re implicated, then people won’t park their money in largely unused luxury apartments in the city anymore—and where will that leave us? What then? 

Ivanka, who was a former executive in her father’s company, is no longer a defendant in the suit, which New York attorney general Letitia James brought against ex-president Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump’s adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr., who helped run the Trump Organization—for allegedly inflating the company’s wealth in order to get more favorable loans and deals. The former president and his sons have denied the allegations.

Ivanka’s brothers had their own day in court recently (both testified Thursday and Eric’s on the stand again on Friday). They have largely taken the know-nothing tact while on the stand, which certainly suits.