Late night host Jimmy Kimmel roasted Ivanka Trump on Wednesday night, after she struggled to recall much as she gave testimony in her father’s $250 million civil fraud trial.
Ms Trump, the former president’s oldest daughter, was the last of the Trump children to testify in Donald Trump’s case in New York on Wednesday.
The former president, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, and other Trump Organization executives and associates are currently being sued for defrauding banks and investors by overvaluing Mr Trump’s net worth and assets by as much as $2.2bn a year to gain more favourable financing terms. Mr Trump has denied the allegations.
Ms Trump hired her own attorney and successfully removed herself as a defendant in the case earlier this year, but her attempts to dodge testifying ultimately failed.
She travelled to the courtroom in Manhattan to testify on Wednesday morning, with Mr Kimmel joking that she arrived with “a serious blowout”.
“It’s like she’s set to shoot a commercial for Pantene or something. If you want to stay in the will, you have to look good,” he added. “That’s the rule.”
“Only in the Trump family does take your daughter to work day mean she’s forced to testify in court,” he added to laughter.
During her testimony, Ms Trump told the court she could not recall much of anything about emails and documents surrounding the allegedly fraudulent business deals under scrutiny from New York’s attorney general – despite her working as an executive vice president of the Trump Organization at the time.
Mr Kimmel did not seem surprised by this.
“On the stand, Ivanka repeatedly answered ‘I don’t recall,’ ‘I don’t recall,’ ‘I don’t recall,’” he mocked.
“Which is a phrase she picked up from her father whenever Eric asked when his birthday was.”
Ms Trump was grilled for more than four hours about allegedly fraudulent documents used to secure favourable loans for the family’s brand-building properties.
“I’m not involved with his personal financial statements,” she told the court. “I didn’t know about his personal statements, per se, other than what you showed me.”
Asked whether she had “any role” preparing Mr Trump’s statements of financial condition, she said: “Not that I’m aware of.”
She also said she does not recall providing any valuations for Mr Trump’s assets or reviewing any of those statements before they were finalised.
Ivanka, once considered by one of the Trumps’ chief lenders as the “heir apparent” of her father’s empire, left the Trump Organization in 2017 to support her father during his presidency. She previously held an “executive vice president” title shared with her brothers.
While this case is civil, Mr Trump, who is currently the front-runner in the Republican presidential primaries, is facing a number of criminal indictments, at both the federal level and in state cases in New York and Georgia.
