One of Donald Trump’s lawyers shockingly said Monday that it’s legal to rape your spouse. 
 
 Michael Cohen, who works for the Republican presidential candidate and real estate mogul, made the outrageous remark while defending Trump from a decades-old allegation that he once forced himself upon his then-wife Ivana. 
 
 “You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse,” Cohen, 48, told the Daily Beast. 
 
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 “It is true,” added the high-powered lawyer, who is also one of Trump’s main political advisors. 
 
 “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.” 
 
 Told that New York in 1984 struck down the marital rape exemption, Cohen demonstrated why he’s known as “Trump’s pitbull.” 
 
 “I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen ranted, according to the news website. 
 
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 Michael Cohen (far r.) said in an interview with the Daily Beast that 'by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.' (Jim Cole/ASSOCIATED PRESS) 
 
 “So I’m warning you, tread very f---ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f---ing disgusting. You understand me? 
 
 “You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up … for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet … you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” the irate attorney threatened. 
 
 Donald Trump's public feuds 
 
 The Daily Beast reporters were asking Cohen about an allegation published in the 1993 book, "The Last Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump." 
 
 Written by Newsweek scribe Harry Hurt III, the book cites a divorce deposition in which Ivana Trump claims her then-husband sexually attacked her. 
 
 Tread very f---ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f---ing disgusting. You understand me? 
 
 According to Hurt’s book, Trump was angry about a scalp reduction surgery gone bad and blamed his blonde bombshell wife. 
 
 Trump began to tear out clumps of his wife’s hair, according to “Last Tycoon,” then ripped off her clothes and assaulted her. 
 
 ''#WHENTRUMPISELECTED' HILARIOUSLY MOCKS TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN 
 
 “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me,’” according to the book. 
 
 Trump had denied both the scalp surgery and the allegations of rape when the book came out. 
 
 Cohen on Monday told the Daily Beast he hadn’t read the entire divorce deposition cited by Hurt. But he had read the relevant pages and said the word “rape” was used in a misleading way. 
 
 Ivana admitted there had been an ugly night between her and her husband in 1989, but said she did not want her words 'to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.' (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images) 
 
 “It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into,” Cohen told The Daily Beast. 
 
 Ivana Trump said “she felt raped emotionally … She was not referring to it (as) a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word,” he said. 
 
 A statement from Ivana, who divorced her husband in 1992, was provided to Hurt by Trump and his lawyers and wound up on the first page of “The Last Tycoon.” 
 
 In it Ivana admitted there had been an ugly night between her and her husband in 1989. 
 
 “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense,” she said in the statement. 
 
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 Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team fired back Monday night after the Daily Beast published an explosive story highlighting decades-old comments Trump’s ex-wife made where she used the word “rape” to describe one of their sexual encounters. 
 
 Ivana Trump later clarified that she didn’t mean the term in a “a literal or criminal sense,” but rather in an emotional sense. 
 
 A spokesperson for Trump, who is currently a frontrunner in many polls of the Republican primary, provided a statement to Business Insider claiming the incident was “old news and it never happened.” They also claimed Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, made up the “rape” allegation as part of an effort to “exploit” him during their early 90’s divorce proceedings. 
 
 “This is an event that has been widely reported on in the past, it is old news and it never happened,” the Trump spokesperson said. “It is a standard lawyer technique, which was used to exploit more money from Mr. Trump especially since he had an ironclad prenuptial agreement.” 
 
 Ivana Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Monday evening. 
 
 The “rape” story first surfaced in the 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” which was written by former Newsweek and Texas Monthly Reporter Harry Hurt III. In that book, Hurt wrote Ivana described a “violent assault” in a deposition that was part of the divorce proceedings and further added that she told “some of her closest confidantes” she was “raped” by Trump. 
 
 When Hurt’s book was published, Trump and his lawyers provided a statement from Ivana that was included on the first page of the biography. Trump and Ivana had reached a $US14 million cash divorce settlement two years earlier in 1991. 
 
 “During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” Ivana Trump’s statement said. “[O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” 
 
 In a 1993 interview with Newsday Trump said the story that appeared in Hurt’s book was “obviously false.” 
 
 Along with claiming the “rape” incident “never happened” and was merely an attempt by Ivana to “exploit” Trump in their divorce, the Trump campaign spokesperson also slammed the Daily Beast in the statement they provided to Business Insider on Monday. 
 
 “It is just a way for the badly failing and money-losing Daily Beast, which has been reporting inaccurately on Mr. Trump for years, to get some publicity for itself,” the Trump spokesperson said. 
 
 The Daily Beast’s initial story on the “rape” allegation included Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, claiming that legally “you cannot rape your spouse.” This is incorrect. According to the Daily Beast, Cohen also threatened the site’s reporters with legal action if they published a story on the accusations. 
 
 “I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” 
 
 Business Insider reached out to the Daily Beast’s executive editor, Noah Shachtman, who provided a series of questions he has for the Trump campaign including whether they have any examples of his site reporting incorrectly on Trump. 
 
 “Did they actually provide any examples of those inaccuracies or are their media critiques as busted as their legal interpretations?” Shachtman asked. 
 
 Shachtman also questioned Cohen’s behaviour and whether Trump shares his attorney’s views on rape. 
 
 “I’d like to know if Mr. Trump also feels that marital rape is not a crime. … We stand by our reporting,” Shachtman said, before adding, “If this was such old, nothing news why is the Trump campaign moving so aggressively to squash it? Why did they threaten our reporter? And also, if Mr. Trump actually makes his way to the White House, the kind of intimidation tactics that Mr. Cohen displayed tonight, would he consider those to be the norm for his administration? I’d love to know answers to those things.” 
 
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 “I mean somebody’s doing it!… Who’s doing the raping?” Donald Trump said, when asked to defend his characterization. 
 
 It was an unfortunate turn of phrase for Trump—in more ways than one. Not only does the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination have a history of controversial remarks about sexual assault, but as it turns out, his ex-wife Ivana Trump once used “rape” to describe an incident between them in 1989. She later said she felt “violated” by the experience. 
 
 Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, “You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.” 
 
 “It is true,” Cohen added. “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.” 
 
 Ivana Trump’s assertion of “rape” came in a deposition—part of the early ’90s divorce case between the Trumps, and revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. 
 
 The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene. After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon. 
 
 “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried. 
 
 What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants. 
 
 “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’” 
 
 Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there. 
 
 “As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes. 
 
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 Donald Trump has previously denied the allegation. In the book, he denies having had the scalp reduction surgery. 
 
 “It’s obviously false,” Donald Trump said of the accusation in 1993, according to Newsday. “It’s incorrect and done by a guy without much talent… He is a guy that is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person.” 
 
 Cohen acknowledged Monday that he has not read the entire deposition but said he had read the two relevant pages of it, including the rape accusation. 
 
 “It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into,” Cohen told The Daily Beast, saying Ivana Trump was talking about how “she felt raped emotionally… She was not referring to it [as] a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.” 
 
 Cohen added that there is no such thing, legally, as a man raping his wife. “You cannot rape your spouse,” he said. “There’s very clear case law.” 
 
 That is not true. In New York, there used to be a so-called marital rape exemption to the law. It was struck down in 1984. 
 
 Trump’s lawyer then changed tactics, lobbing insults and threatening a lawsuit if a story was published. 
 
 “I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” 
 
 “You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added. 
 
 When Lost Tycoon was about to be printed, Donald Trump and his lawyers provided a statement from Ivana, which was posted on the first page of the book. In it, Ivana confirms that she had “felt violated” and that she had stated that her husband had raped her during a divorce deposition. But Ivana sought to soften her earlier statement. 
 
 “During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” the Ivana Trump statement said. “[O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” 
 
 The statement, according to a “Notice to the Reader” in the book, “does not contradict or invalidate any information contained in this book.” 
 
 Nevertheless, Cohen, Trump’s attorney, said that “there is nothing reasonable about you wanting to write a story about somebody’s usage of the word ‘rape,’ when she’s talking [about how] she didn’t feel emotionally satisfied.” 
 
 “Though there’s many literal senses to the word, if you distort it, and you put Mr. Trump’s name there onto it, rest assured, you will suffer the consequences. So you do whatever you want. You want to ruin your life at the age of 20? You do that, and I’ll be happy to serve it right up to you,” he added. 
 
 “I think you should go ahead and you should write the story that you plan on writing. I think you should do it. Because I think you’re an idiot. And I think your paper’s a joke, and it’s going to be my absolute pleasure to serve you with a $500 million lawsuit, like I told [you] I did it to Univision,” Cohen continued. 
 
 The 1990 divorce case between the two Trumps was granted on the grounds of Donald’s “cruel and inhuman treatment” of Ivana. The settlement, under which the Trumps agreed on the division of assets, was finalized in 1991. Her divorce involved a gag order that keeps her from talking about her marriage to Donald Trump without his permission. 
 
 Divorce records in New York state are not open to public inspection. But some of the legal documents surrounding the contract dispute over the Trumps’ prenuptial agreement are still available and were reviewed by The Daily Beast. 
 
 In one such document, Ivana Trump’s lawyers claim that in the three years preceding their divorce Donald Trump, “has increasingly verbally abused and demeaned [her] so as to obtain her submission to his wishes and desires” as well as “humiliated and verbally assaulted” her. The New York County Clerk’s records office couldn’t locate at least one box of documents relating to the contract dispute. (It’s not uncommon for court files to go missing.) 
 
 Ivana Trump did not respond to a request for comment. 
 
 Donald Trump has a history of grandstanding on rape. His controversial campaign-trail comments this year about Mexicans were hardly the first time he has waded into the hot-button issue of sexual assault. 
 
 Two years ago, Trump weighed in on the alarming rate of sexual assault and rape in the military—and in doing so, pinned the blame on the presence of women. 
 
 “26,000 unreported sexual [assaults] in the military—only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” he tweeted in 2013. “The Generals and top military brass never wanted a mixer but were forced to do it by very dumb politicians who wanted to be politically [correct]!” he continued. 
 
 In 1989, the real estate mogul placed a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the five alleged rapists of Trisha Meili, the Central Park jogger who was put in a coma by her assailants. The defendants received different sentences and served between six and 13 years behind bars before new evidence of coerced confessions emerged that led to their convictions being vacated in 2002. 
 
 “Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” Trump’s 1989 ad blared. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” 
 
 Trump’s other public statements on rape cases range from tone-deaf to offensive. In 1992, he floated the idea that convicted rapist and boxer Mike Tyson should be allowed to pay “millions and millions” of dollars to rape victims instead of serving jail time. Trump’s modest proposal did not go over well. 
 
 “How offensive,” shot back Dollyne Pettingill, spokeswoman for the mayor of Indianapolis, where Tyson committed the assault. “We have a judicial process for these matters and it’s not for sale.” 
 
 Whether Trump’s comments about rape—or the accusation of assault from his ex-wife—will hurt his burgeoning political career is an open question. So far, Trump has been able to shake off the sorts of scandals that would destroy any other campaign for president. Dissing Mexican immigrants and prisoners of war has not cost him his campaign, nor has his history of giving to Democratic campaigns. In the latest CNN poll, Trump leads all other candidates in the Republican presidential field, with 18 percent support. 
 
 —with additional reporting by Nina Strochlic and Asawin Suebsaeng 
 
 Update 7/28/15 9:50 AM: Ivana Trump released a statement Tuesday morning to CNN. 
 
 “I have recently read some comments attributed to me from nearly 30 years ago at a time of very high tension during my divorce from Donald. The story is totally without merit. Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of. I have nothing but fondness for Donald and wish him the best of luck on his campaign. Incidentally, I think he would make an incredible president.” 
 
 Ironically, Ivana says a story based on her own words in a divorce deposition are “totally without merit.” 
 
 In further irony, Trump is distancing himself from his lawyer. 
 
 “Mr. Trump speaks for Mr. Trump and nobody but Mr. Trump speaks for him,” a campaign source told CNN.
– Donald Trump's lawyer seems pretty ignorant of the law—at least as it pertains to marital rape. The Daily Beast reports that when Michael Cohen, special counsel for the Trump Organization, was asked about an alleged incident from 1989 involving Trump's ex-wife Ivana, he claimed "that by the very definition, you can't rape your spouse"—and then threatened reporter Tim Mak, allegedly telling him to "tread very f---ing lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be f---ing disgusting." "You write a story that has Mr. Trump's name in it, with the word 'rape,' and I'm going to mess your life up ... for as long as you're on this frickin' planet," Cohen warned, per the Beast, which notes that New York outlawed marital rape in 1984. The alleged incident Cohen was asked about was described in the 1993 Trump biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, reports the New York Daily News. The book, citing a divorce deposition, describes an incident in which Trump allegedly forced himself on Ivana as revenge for her having talked him into failed scalp-reduction surgery, though the book contains a statement from her saying that while she referred to the incident as "rape," she doesn't want her words "to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense." A Trump spokesperson tells Business Insider that the incident is "old news and it never happened" and that Ivana made it up to "exploit" Trump during divorce proceedings.