Former US President Donald Trump was paranoid during his tenure as President, of being hit in the face with a pie. Getting hit with a pie, often called getting “pied”, is used as a protest tactic by protesters against public officials.
According to The Daily Beast, Mr Trump's ex-lawyer Michael Cohen spoke about the former president's paranoia about getting hit with pie. In a deposition on May 9, Mr Cohen revealed that Mr Trump had gotten obsessed with the idea ever since Microsoft Founder Bill Gates had been struck in the face with a cream pie.
He said, “For some reason that upset Mr. Trump terribly…We were all instructed that if somebody was to ever throw anything at him, that if that person didn't end up in the hospital, we'd all be fired.”
He went on to add, “He never would turn around and say, ‘If anyone throws a rock or a bottle…' It's always a pie. He always brought up that pie thing.”
Mr Cohen used to be Mr Trump's personal attorney but their relationship soured when Mr Cohen turned on his former boss as part of negotiations to get him a reduced sentence when he was tried for violating campaign finance laws in the US.
Mr Cohen was serving time for tax evasion, false statements and campaign finance violations - the last related to payments to silence women who alleged affairs with Trump before the 2016 presidential election.
He was released to home confinement in May 2020 given the risks of catching COVID-19 in prison, but then was briefly imprisoned again in July of the same year. A federal judge then ruled Mr Cohen had been subjected to retaliation for planning to publish his book, and ordered him released again.
Mr Cohen, who once said he would "take a bullet" for Mr Trump, later also cooperated with Democratic-led congressional inquiries. Mr Trump called Mr Cohen a "rat", who in turn called the former US President a "racist," a "con man" and "a cheat” in his book.
