WASHINGTON — Video was released Friday of Donald Trump acknowledging that his now-famous comments calling Mexicans “rapists” harmed his business interests.
A District of Columbia Superior Court released earlier this summer transcripts of Trump’s deposition and sworn testimony from his children over his loss of business following his comments on Mexico. CNN and a group of other news outlets petitioned successfully for the release of the actual video from the lawsuit involving two Washington restaurateurs.
The video’s release caps a challenging week following an underwhelming debate performance and comes with a little more than a month until the election.
Shortly after he launched his campaign, Macy’s department store, Serta, Univision and others cut their ties with him. Univision later settled with him for “a substantial” but undisclosed amount of money, according to Trump.
“I guess they didn’t like my comments,” Trump told lawyers in a lawsuit over two restaurateurs who backed out of plans for his recently opened hotel at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, just a few blocks from the White House.
Trump sued the two celebrity chefs, Geoffrey Zakarian and Jose Andres, after they cited his comments about Mexicans in their decision to cancel the planned restaurants. Both Zakarian and Andres filed countersuits.
Another deposition taken in the lawsuit shows Ivanka Trump seemed to understand the damage by her father’s comments and she “suggested a clarification because I felt that his comments were being misconstrued.”
“Basically I was playing around with the idea of the fact that the media was spinning what he said to be about Hispanic people generally, as opposed to illegal Immigrants, which he subsequently clarified on his own,” Ivanka Trump told lawyers.
Trump’s lawyers had argued against the release of the video, saying that it would likely become campaign fodder, but the judge in the case decided that was not a strong enough argument in a filing issued Thursday evening.
