Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump called a lawyer and breastfeeding mother “disgusting” after she requested a break from a deposition in order to pump, according to The New York Times report on Tuesday.
According to the paper, lawyer Elizabeth Beck was questioning Trump in 2011 about a failed Florida real estate project. Beck, with her husband, represented clients who claimed to lose thousands of dollars in the deal. At one point, Beck, who had a 3-month-old daughter, requested a medical break which was contested by Trump and his lawyers, who wanted to continue, the Times says. That’s when Beck took out her breast pump to show that her request was urgent — she needed to pump for her infant. “You’re disgusting,” Trump told Beck before leaving the room.
The quote is not disputed by Trump’s camp.
In an interview with Fox And Friends on Wednesday morning, Beck says she had pre-negotiated breaks during the deposition in order for her to pump. “[Trump] got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting,you're a loser,your baby is a loser, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there,” Beck said. She called his behavior “an absolute meltdown.”
lan Garten, a lawyer for Trump who was present at the deposition, told the Times that Trump’s statement “was in no way a statement about her decision to breastfeed or pump. It was solely the fact that she was appearing to do it in the middle of a deposition,” and Garten said Beck was using the pump break as an excuse to get Trump "excited and unbalanced" by exposing her breasts.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday morning, Trump addressed the incident, claiming that Beck “wanted to breast pump in front of me” at the deposition. He also wrote that “Lawyer Elizabeth Beck did a terrible job against me, she lost (I even got legal fees). I could have had her, she is easy.”
Shilpa Phadke, Senior Director, Women’s Initiative, for the Center for American Progress tells Fox News that Trump’s breastfeeding quote represents just “another example of how out of touch he is.”
Phadke adds that the words don’t bode well for the candidate’s presidential run. “What women in America want out of their next presidential candidate is someone who is in touch with the reality,” she says. “They are looking for solutions to everyday problems. We’ve seen in the last few elections how important the women’s vote is, and it will be very interesting to see how women react to Trump’s words.”