This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from IHeart Radio.

In 2023 and 24, author E. Jean Carroll faced Donald Trump in court and won both times.

My guest today is the attorney who took on Trump in both cases and secured two unanimous jury verdicts against him. Roberta or Robbie Kaplan is a

renowned civil litigator and trial lawyer with decades of experience in commercial,

higher education, government regulation,

and civil rights litigation. She has been consistently ranked as one of the top litigators in the

country. Kaplan famously wanted the Supreme Court on behalf of LGBTQ rights activist Edith

Windsor in a landmark case that require the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Kaplan attended Harvard University and Columbia Law School.

But before settling in New York City, Kaplan studied Russian history and briefly lived in Moscow.

I was curious what it was like living in Russia.

In a lot of ways, I think it shaped my view of the world more than anything else in my life.

It was 1987. I'm very old. And Glasnosed had been announced. Gorbachev was the head of the government.

Glassos had been announced, but it was still the old system. And so I got, you know, a semester of seeing what it was like to live in a totalitarian, authoritarian regime. And it was insane. We had, we would go into our, and there would be these bugs at the ceiling.

And sometimes the bugs would break, and you'd hear, like, all the static coming out.

And everyone would just act like it was normal.

The teachers all had to be Communist Party members.

And so they had a class on the Russian word is Strana, Vienna.

I guess it would be like customs of the country. And they would say things like, oh, you know, we have the Kamsomol. And then one of the American kids would raise their hands and say, oh, we have the same thing. It's the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. And I'd be like, what are you talking about? Like, it was just terrifying to see how if you put people, even Americans, I guess we're seeing that today, but if you put Americans in that environment, they kind of succumb to it.

It gave me, I'm sorry to say, gave me a very negative view of human nature, which probably

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