A flood of credible death threats and antisemitic messages have inundated the judge and court staff overseeing Donald Trump’s fraud trial in New York, according to the court’s top public safety officer.
Judge Arthur Engoron and his clerk received “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment, according to a court filing to support a gag order that blocks Mr Trump from attacking the court’s staff.
Transcriptions of threatening voicemails after Mr Trump first targeted Judge Engoron’s chief clerk fill more than 275 single-spaced pages, according to Wednesday’s filing.
The threats against them are “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” according to the filing from Charles Hollon, an officer-captain with the court’s Department of Public Safety assigned to a judicial threats unit.
“You should be executed,” one message reads.
“Trust me when I say this,” reads another. “I will come for you. I don’t care. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me either.”
Last week, a state appellate court judge temporarily froze two gag orders that Judge Engoron put in place to protect his court’s staff from Mr Trump’s abuse and from subsequent attacks that flooded his office.
“The implementation of the limited gag orders resulted in a decrease in the number of threats, harassment, and disparaging messages that the judge and his staff received,” Mr Hollon wrote in the filing on Wednesday.
“However, when Mr Trump violated the gag orders, the number of threatening, harassing and disparaging messages increased,” he added.
Mr Trump’s false statements about Ms Greenfield, which Judge Engoron ordered him to remove from Truth Social, “resulted in hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages,” according to Mr Hollon’s statement.
Her cell phone and email address were reportedly compromised, “resulting in daily doxing,” and she has since been subjected to “harassing, disparaging comments and antisemitic tropes” on a daily basis.
She receives dozens of harassing phone calls and social media messages and emails each day, half of which are antisemitic, according to Mr Hollon.
The filing attaches several voicemail transcriptions, including one left for Ms Greenfield: “Jews like you. Fat ******* stupid *******. Lay off the Twinkies, you *****. You’re clearly a ***** and a child molester. You ******* pedophilic *****. Anyway, listen. You look like ****. You’re ******* filthy. Ugly. Dirty. I bet your ***** smells like a ******* garbage disposal. Guaranteed. Anyway, lose some ******* weight. Have a little pride in yourself, you fat *****.”
Those threats have “created an ongoing security risk for the judge, his staffand his family,” Mr Hollon wrote.
Justice Arthur Engoron, right, presides over Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial on 13 November, with his chief clerk Allison Greenfield beside him.— (Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Judge Engoron shot down what he called “unpersuasive” First Amendment arguments from Mr Trump’s attorneys against his gag orders, pointing to threats of political violence that have surrounded the former president’s criminal and civil cases since his first indictment earlier this year.
“The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented,” Judge Engoron wrote.
He said his chambers “have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages.”
“The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm,” he added.
Wednesday’s filing supports the judge’s appeal of last week’s order, which has unbound Mr Trump and other parties in the trial from disparaging members of the court.
Within the week after the gag order was paused, Mr Trump posted about clerk Allison Greenfield at least three times on his Truth Social account.
Moments after the gag was lifted on 16 November, he called her a “politically biased, and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW.”
Two days later, he attacked the “crooked and highly partisan Law Clerk, Allison Greenfield”.
“Regardless of what we say to show our TOTAL INNOCENCE, and it has been proven in many was, and many times over, this political, Trump Hating Judge, together with his horrendous, seething with ANGER Law Clerk, with her illegal campaign contributions, will find me guilty as hell,” he wrote on 21 November.
A lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses the former president, his two adult sons and chief business associates of grossly inflating his net worth and assets in financial statements given to banks and lenders to receive favourable financing terms.
Judge Engoron has already found the defendants liable for fraud.
The trial, now in its eighth week, threatens to collapse his real estate empire in the state and could result in tens of millions of dollars in fines against the defendants.
Federal judges also are reviewing a gag order against Mr Trump in a case surrounding his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
During a hearing on Monday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel was skeptical of arguments from his legal team to overturn a gag order that blocks him from attacking witnesses and prosecutors in the criminal conspiracy case.
The judges appeared likely to narrow the scope of the order, in an attempt to balance First Amendment protections around political speech while addressing the wave of threats and harassment unleashed by Mr Trump and his supporters towards the prosecutors, judges, witnesses and prospective jurors involved with a growing number of cases against him.
A recent filing from US Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith’s team described that dynamic as “part of a pattern, stretching back years, in which people publicly targeted” by Mr Trump are “subject to harassment, threats, and intimidation.”
Mr Trump “seeks to use this well-known dynamic to his advantage,” the filing added, and “it has continued unabated as this case and other unrelated cases involving the defendant have progressed.”
