Ivanka Trump was the last member of the family to take the stand in New York court. Unlike her father Donald and her brothers Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, she is not being sued in this civil trial, given that she has not been involved in the management of the empire since 2017 and the statute of limitations has expired. Ivanka Trump, 42, has chosen her own lawyers and has distanced herself from her father since the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Nonetheless, her testimony, on Wednesday, November 8, was eagerly awaited in this trial in which Donald Trump is accused of artificially inflating his assets to secure substantial loans at advantageous rates from his bankers, notably Deutsche Bank.
Like her brothers before her, Ivanka Trump, who had been executive vice president of the organization before becoming an unpaid White House advisor in January 2017, claimed no responsibility. She said that she had no role in her father's personal financial statements. But her answers and the documents presented to her showed she was aware of the importance of her father's asset declarations in securing the best financial terms.
On Wednesday, for example, the court examined the purchase of a luxury golf course in Miami, the Doral Golf Club, which was in bankruptcy proceedings in 2011. "It was in rather poor condition," Ivanka Trump told the judge. "We invested an enormous amount of money in repositioning the asset." In order to acquire it, Donald Trump needed a loan of $125 million (€116.8 million). Deutsche Bank demanded a personal guarantee from Donald Trump, who was alleged to have a personal fortune of $2.5 billion and $50 million in cash.
Emails revealed that Ivanka Trump had proposed in a prior exchange to reduce Donald Trump's net worth from $3 billion to $2 billion. It was Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who had put her father in touch with Deutsche Bank's wealth management department. In another e-mail, she expressed her delight at the negotiations with the financial institution. "It doesn't get better than this. Let's discuss asap," she wrote in reference to a loan obtained for Doral Golf in an internal Trump Organization e-mail presented by the prosecution.
On the stand, Ivanka Trump said she had no precise recollection of the various correspondences. Donald Trump was required to present the state of his fortune every year and, according to prosecutors, in 2014 and 2015 he produced falsified accounts. The prosecution gave the example of one of his triplexes in New York, whose value went from $80 million to $327 million between 2011 and 2015, allegedly overstating its surface area by a factor of three.
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