Former President Donald Trump recently boasted about his own accomplishments, complain about the country’s “broken” justice system during a deposition last year.
On October 19, Trump was deposed for a defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist who has also accused the former president of sexual assault in a separate lawsuit.
An excerpt of Carroll’s and Trump’s depositions were unsealed on Friday.
The records show a combative Trump true to form: He repeatedly insulted Carroll — and at one point mischaracterized her words, claiming she said “rape was sexy” — and gave rambling answers to the opposing counsel, Roberta Kaplan.
Kaplan declined to comment for this story.
Donald Trump talks about Truth Social and Save America
Here are some of the meandering moments from Trump’s deposition:
When the opposing counsel asked about Trump’s social media alternative to Twitter, Truth Social, and the number of followers he had, the former president began to talk about how well the platform was supposedly doing.
He claimed that Truth Social was “number one ahead of TikTok, number one ahead of Twitter, number one ahead of Instagram and everyone else for the last number of days.”
“They have the ratings, and they said Truth Social is hot,” he said.
It’s unclear what ratings Trump was referencing. According to a November report from TheRighting, a company that analyzes right-wing media trends, Truth Social’s number of unique visitors was experiencing a two-month decline around the time of Trump’s deposition.
The platform went from 4.02 million visitors in August to 2.95 million unique visitors in October, according to the report.
One of Trump’s statements that Carroll’s attorney focused on was a Truth Social post published on October 12, 2022, in which Trump called the rape accusation against him a “hoax.” Kaplan asked several questions about how the statement was prepared. At one point, Trump clarified it was a Save America statement, referencing one of the former president’s fundraising vehicles, before he had an epiphany mid-deposition.
“This was a Save America statement, which is very interesting actually because it is saving America, stopping people from doing things like this, trying to save — it’s one big part of saving America.”
