Donald Trump calls him a “very partisan Trump hater”: Juan Merchan is the judge who read the indictment to the Republican on Tuesday afternoon New York time in Manhattan District Court and who, according to standard practice, will also preside over the hearing if Trump because of his Payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels on trial. He got the case as a result of a rotating process whereby judges are given oversight of grand juries and the resulting trials.
For Merchan, the historic trial against the former US President is not the first professional contact with the Trump cosmos. He has sentenced Trump’s close confidante Allen Weisselberg to jail, swung the gavel in the Trump Organization’s tax fraud trial, and led the fraud case against former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Trump therefore considers Merchan to be biased and demands that he “must be replaced”. “The highly partisan judge and his family are well-known Trump haters,” the ex-president rumbled on his Twitter replacement, Truth Social, before the indictment was read out. “He was an unfair disaster in a previous Trump-related case, refused to back down, gave the jury terrible instructions, and was impossible to negotiate with during the witch hunt.”
At the court hearing on Tuesday, Merchan expressly asked everyone involved: “Please refrain from statements […] that have the potential to provoke violence, provoke unrest [or] endanger the state or the well-being of individuals.” The judge also asked Trump not to engage in rhetoric that “endangers the rule of law.”
But Merchan also has enough experience not to be unnerved by Trump’s attacks. Born in Colombia, he came to the United States at the age of six and grew up in New York City. He was the first member of his family to attend college, worked his way through school and earned a law degree from Hofstra University in 1994.
Merchan initially worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan and worked in the Attorney General’s Office before then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed him Family Judge on the New York County Supreme Court in 2006. He has held his current post at the Criminal Court since 2009.
Merchan knows all about headline-grabbing negotiations. In addition to the trials from the Trump cosmos, for example, in 2013 he led the sensational trial against base jumpers who had jumped from the One World Trade Center, which was still under construction at the time. Merchan sentenced the defendants to community service, saying they “smeared the memory of those who jumped on 9/11 not for sport, but because they had to.”
Merchan also presided over the trial underlying the 2021 film Soccer Mom Madam. The case involved a suburban mom who secretly ran a high-end escort service in Manhattan.
Lawyers and court representatives who know Merchan therefore consider the judge to be well suited for the Trump trial: “He is very calm and balanced in his conduct of the courtroom,” the US news site “Politico” quoted criminal defense attorney Stacey Richman as saying.
And Nicholas Gravante, who represented Trump confidante Weisselberg in court, describes Merchan to the Associated Press (AP) news agency as a “true listener, well prepared, always approachable and a man who kept his word”. “He was considerate of the role that my colleagues and I played as attorneys and treated us with the utmost respect both in court and behind closed doors,” recalls Gravante.
Frank Rothman, who has served 37 years at the Manhattan Criminal Court, puts it even more bluntly: Merchan “is a very thorough guy, even-tempered,” defense attorney AP tells. “He treats people with respect and doesn’t do shit.”
Sources: Washington Post, Politico, Donald Trump on Truth Social
