The judge who presided over a blockbuster fraud trial alleging brazen fraud in Donald Trump’s real estate empire says he still gets harassing phone calls and messages after he was subject to an avalanche of attacks from the president and his allies.
New York Justice Arthur Engoron, who is now retired, was bombarded with antisemitic and homophobic comments throughout the civil trial. His office received an envelope with white powder, and a bomb threat was called into his home hours before the closing arguments in the case.
“Judges would know the primary rule: We cannot fight back,” Engoron told CBS News. “That just goes with the territory. No matter what we’re called.”
Following an investigation from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, Engoron determined Trump and his family business defrauded banks and investigators in a years-long scheme to inflate the value of his properties. In 2024, after a bench trial in a Manhattan courtroom, Engoron ordered Trump, his adult sons and their chief associates in the Trump Organization to forfeit more than $364 million, with growing interest, from their “ill-gotten gains.”
The case is still playing out in appeals, though state appeals court judges have upheld Engoron’s findings that Trump and his business partners committed brazen fraud. The judge says he “tried to do the right thing.”
“I had my moments of glory,” he told CBS News. “I tried to do the right thing. I tried to be very even-handed when I made rulings. You don’t count the rulings, but at the end of the day, I think I ruled for each side somewhat similarly, if it was quantified at all … So it was a net positive. I was glad I got to do it.”
Engoron and his court staff faced a deluge of threats and harassment after a trial began in New York County Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan.
A bomb threat at his family’s home in January 2024 arrived hours after Trump posted a tirade against the judge on his Truth Social.
Trump, at the time, lashed out against the court’s release of an email exchange that revealed his lawyers refusing to commit their client to limiting his outbursts in their pitch for his delivery of closing arguments that morning.
Engoron was walking his dog that morning when he saw police lights in the distance, he told CBS News.
“There’s been a credible bomb threat against your house. Is there anybody else in the house?” he recalled a police lieutenant asking him.
His wife and children were inside the home, he said.
Police ultimately determined that the threat was “unfounded,” among similar politically charged “swatting” and hoax bomb threats against officials across the country.
The threat did not impact proceedings in the trial, which resumed later that morning. Engoron did not address the threat when he returned to the bench.
Engoron — who Trump routinely labeled a “wack job” and “lunatic” throughout the trial — allowed Trump to personally address the court that morning, despite his legal team failing to limit his remarks to the case itself without using the moment for a campaign stunt.
In his closing remarks from the defense table, Trump launched into a long-winded unbroken sentence of familiar grievances while painting himself as the victim of political persecution who should be owed money for the litigation against him.
“We should receive damages for what we’ve gone through,” Trump said. “What happened here, sir, is a fraud on me.”
In the weeks leading up to that unprecedented exchange, Engoron and his staff were inundated with “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages,” according to a court filing from a top law enforcement official with the court’s Department of Public Safety.
Transcriptions of threatening voicemails after Trump first targeted Engoron’s chief clerk fill more than 275 single-spaced pages, the filing stated.
On the trial’s second day, Trump falsely accused Engoron’s clerk Alison Greenfield of being Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend” and posted a link to her Instagram account.
Engoron later told the court, without naming Trump, that he ordered a “disparaging, untrue and personally-identifying post about a member of my staff” to be deleted.
“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I will not tolerate them under any circumstances,” he said. “Consider this statement a gag order from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any members of my staff.”
An officer had to escort Engoron’s clerk to and from her home after Trump’s attacks, Engoron told CBS News.
“I sometimes say that law clerks are the greatest invention in the history of the world. They’re just there to help … and we want to protect them because they can’t protect themselves as much as we can,” Engoron said.
Those attacks “didn’t affect my rulings, my thoughts about the case,” he added.
