Allen Weisselberg, center, is escorted to Manhattan criminal court on March 4 in New York.
Associated PressAllen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime CFO
Court filings show four of the five charges against him stem from falsehoods the ex-CFO told about Trump’s Manhattan penthouse, one of the assets at issue in the New York Attorney General’s recent fraud trial against the former president and his company.
Longtime readers of Forbes have long known about the lies surrounding his Trump Tower apartment. For more than a decade, the Trump Organization has been fibbing about the apartment’s size. Trump associates claimed on financial documents and boasted to Forbes on the phone, in person and via email that Trump’s opulent triplex apartment was more than 30,000 square feet, occupying the entire top three floors of Trump Tower.
In 2016 Forbes dug into New York City records, which showed Trump’s apartment actually only occupies parts of those floors. The rest of the space belongs to a neighbor, who owns his own 3,368-square-foot property on two of the floors. Also in Trump’s inflated math are common elements on the floors, such as elevators and hallways that would be owned by Trump Tower’s residents through the building's condo association, rather than Trump himself.
Forbes sent the Trump Organization questions about the square footage discrepancy starting in 2016, emailing about the penthouse in August 2016, February 2017 and March 2017. Forbes published a story in May 2017, exposing the then-president’s lies, showing that Trump’s penthouse is only 10,996 square feet—far smaller than Trump boasted. The Trump Organization began using the correct square footage on its internal documents soon after, documents show.
The penthouse’s square footage became a central issue in the civil fraud case against the ex-president, as the state alleged it was among the assets Trump and his associates fraudulently inflated on financial statements in order to obtain more favorable business deals. In a ruling finding the defendants liable for fraud even before the trial began (the case then moved forward over other allegations), Judge Arthur Engoron called the discrepancy over the apartment’s size “absurd.” “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron wrote.
Weisselberg tried to distance himself from the penthouse controversy in both a July 2020 deposition taken during the attorney general’s investigation and at the trial in the fraud case in October 2023.
The two charges that Weisselberg pleaded guilty to on Monday both stem from the 2020 deposition. In the first count, Weisselberg testified he “didn’t find out about the error” in the penthouse’s size until the Forbes article came out, despite Forbes asking about the discrepancy long before the article came out, and despite internal emails showing Weisselberg being sent documents with the correct square footage. The second count charges Weisselberg with falsely testifying that he had never been present when Trump described the size of his penthouse, despite him joining a meeting between Forbes and Trump in 2015, during which Trump repeatedly lied about the size of his apartment.
Forbes notes show that Weisselberg—who testified under oath at the trial that he “never even thought about the apartment” enough to notice it was measured wrong on financial statements—frequently paid attention to the penthouse, and its size. As Forbes laid out in October, Weisselberg was involved in trying to inflate the value of the Trump apartment since as early as 2012. “Allen asked why we count large private estates for other billionaires and not Trump. He said we should be including his NY penthouse. He thinks it’s worth more [than] $88m,” wrote a reporter at the time. Weisselberg would continue to tell Forbes what he believed Trump’s penthouse was worth: “Now Allen says it’s worth $200M, and there’s no debt,” a Forbes reporter documented in 2013, while in 2014 notes show Weisselberg bumped up his estimate to “$163m with 0 debt.” (Forbes independently valued the property at a more modest $90 million, up from $64 million in 2012.)
The ex-CFO was pulled off the stand in October, the same day Forbes published the allegations of his perjury. In February, reports emerged that he was in negotiations for a plea deal on perjury charges. Weisselberg did not plead guilty Monday to a charge related to his comments at the fraud trial on Trump’s penthouse—which directly cited Forbes’ reporting—but prosecutors said in a statement he “admits and agrees that he committed the conduct underlying” the charge.
In a statement Monday following the guilty pleas, attorney Seth Rosenberg told reporters that “Allen Weisselberg looks forward to putting this situation behind him.”
