Donald Trump’s former campaign press secretary described the “crisis” caused by the release of the infamous Access Hollywood video during the 2016 presidential race, as she took the stand to testify in the Manhattan “hush money” trial against the former US president.
Hope Hicks, who worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign and followed him to the White House, described how the tape — in which the then-candidate was heard to brag about grabbing women’s genitals — was a “damaging development” for the Republican nominee’s election bid, which was “going to be hard to overcome”.
Trump’s team believed “this was a crisis”, said Hicks, who previously worked for Fox Corp and is now a communications consultant.
However Trump himself considered the recorded comments, published just days before the November 2016 vote, to be “pretty standard stuff”, she said.
“Mr Trump felt like this wasn’t good, but was also just two guys talking privately,” Hicks testified, while Trump looked on from the defence table. “He felt like this was pretty standard stuff for two guys chatting with each other.”
The longtime Trump aide’s testimony came at the end of the third week of the trial in which the former president stands accused of covering up payments made to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, a porn actor who alleged she had an extramarital affair with him.
The prosecution called Hicks in an attempt to prove its theory that Trump was desperate to prevent further bad publicity from emerging in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape when he agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case, claims these transactions therefore amounted to an attempt to “corrupt” the election.
The judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, has banned prosecutors from playing the tape to the jury, but allowed a transcript of Trump’s comments to be read in court.
Earlier in the day, Merchan directly addressed Trump to contradict comments from the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s election claiming a court-imposed gag order would prevent him from taking the stand in his own defence.
“You have an absolute right to testify at trial, if that is what you decide to do,” Merchan said. “That is a constitutional right”.
Trump was fined $9,000 on Tuesday for repeatedly violating the gag order, which bars him from attacking witnesses or jurors in the case. Merchan warned that he could jail Trump if he continued to flout the order.
On his way into the courtroom on Friday morning, Trump told reporters he would be “filing a lawsuit on the constitutionality of [the gag order]” but provided no further details.
