On Thursday, a higher court rejected Ivanka Trump’s request to delay her testimony in her father’s civil fraud trial, despite her claims that she would face “undue hardship” if she had to appear during the school week.
In an appeal filed on Thursday, Trump’s attorney argued, in part, that “Ms. Trump, who resides in Florida with her three minor children, will suffer undue hardship” if a stay is denied and she is required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week in a case she has already been dismissed from, before her appeal is heard.
Trump filed this appeal in an effort to delay New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron’s order that she appear before him and give testimony until the appeal could be reviewed by the New York Court of Appeals. Additionally, the appeal requested the entire fraud trial against former President Donald Trump, two of his adult sons, and the firm be put on hold until her appeal could be considered.
The request for a stay was quickly refused in a document filed late Thursday.
Both of Ivanka Trump’s older brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who helped manage the Trump Organisation while their father was in the White House, were in court on Thursday morning. On Monday, President Trump is slated to testify.
After hearing a motion by Ivanka Trump’s lawyer to have her subpoena quashed, Engoron last week ordered her to testify on Wednesday. At the end of the Thursday night petition, Ivanka Trump’s lawyers requested the appeals court to postpone the judgement requiring her testimony as well as a “stay of the trial.”
Her attorney has argued that the New York civil court has no jurisdiction to compel her evidence because she has not lived or worked in New York since 2017 and she is no longer a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
Ivanka Trump was not included in the August 2021 deal between the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Trump Organisation to toll the statute of limitations, thus in June, a New York appeals court removed her as a co-defendant, saying the charges against her were too old.