Donald Trump’s seismic criminal case could be the most sensational proceeding in the history of Manhattan’s New York City courthouse — but the spectacle follows a long line of celebrity defendants who’ve walked the building’s drab hallways.
Trump was arraigned Tuesday on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection to hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, former Playboy model Karen McDougal and a doorman.
As the first U.S. president to face criminal charges, the indictment is unprecedented.
But countless famous figures have trudged through the dingy corridors of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre St., which has hosted many scandalous cases.
Shortly before 11 p.m. on Dec. 8, 1980, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, arrived at the entrance to their exclusive apartment building — The Dakota — on the Upper West Side.
Mark David Chapman, crouching down, fired five shots into Lennon’s back, then calmly waited until police arrested him.
He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison before a packed gallery.
The defendant, given an opportunity to address the court, read a passage from J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye.”
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He has been denied parole 12 times and has admitted he had “evil in my heart” when he gunned down the international icon to achieve notoriety.
“I wanted the fame so much that I was willing to give everything and take a human life,” he told the board. “I wasn’t going to be a nobody anymore.”
Rap mogul Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, was found not guilty of gun and bribery charges in 2001 in Manhattan Supreme Court in a case that almost ensnared his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez.
Combs, Lopez, his bodyguard, Anthony “Wolf” Jones, and his rapper protege, Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, were at a now-defunct club in Times Square on Dec. 28, 1999, when a gunfight broke out and three people were left injured.
The melee erupted after Combs accidentally knocked a drink from another patron’s hand. The slighted man responded by shoving Combs and his friend tossed a stack of cash in the rapper’s face.
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Lopez and Combs were arrested after they fled the scene in a Lincoln Navigator with a gun in the trunk — but the Bronx singer was quickly cleared.
After a seven-week trial and 22 hours of jury deliberation, Combs and Jones were acquitted – but Barrow was convicted of shooting two people and hit with 10 years in prison.
Combs’ high-powered legal team, Johnny Cochran and Ben Brafman, celebrated their courtroom victory, which inspired a “Law & Order” episode.
In a case that garnered global headlines, a maid accused the then-director of the International Monetary Fund of forcing her to perform oral sex on him in a $3,000-a-night suite at the Sofitel hotel in New York.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who many thought would run as the next president of France, was hauled off a plane that was departing New York for Paris and arrested on May 14, 2011.
He was released on $6 million bond and confined to a $50,000-a-month Tribeca townhome as the case against him rapidly fell apart.
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Although semen was found on his boxers and her uniform, prosecutors could not prove lack of consent.
Three months later, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office under Cyrus Vance Jr. moved to dismiss the indictment, having lost faith in the accuser, Mafissatou Diallo, who had told a series of lies about her past and the incident itself.
“If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so,” prosecutors wrote in a filing.
Many accused Vance’s office of rushing to charge the global finance titan before conducting a thorough investigation and his reputation was left in tatters.
The once-celebrated Oscar-winning producer was sentenced to 23 years in prison for forcibly performing oral sex on film production assistant Mimi Haley in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in 2013.
Weinstein was acquitted of first-degree rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault stemming from actor Annabella Sciorra’s allegations from the ’90s.
During the two-month trial, which was held in the same courtroom where Trump was arraigned, spectators waited hours to snag a seat in the gallery and catch a glimpse of the fallen king of Hollywood.
The conviction helped to restore the reputation of Vance’s reign after the disastrous Dominique Strauss-Kahn prosecution and was considered a culmination of the #MeToo movement.
The infamous fraudster was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison in 2019 for a series of scams, including trying to obtain a $22 million bank loan purportedly to launch an exclusive private club in Manhattan.
She posed as a wealthy heiress and insinuated her way into New York high society, ripping off more than $200,000 from businesses and friends.
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“I am stunned by the depths of the defendant’s deception, her labyrinth of lies that kept her con afloat,” said Justice Diane Kiesel before handing down the sentence.
The trial was often delayed when Sorokin threw temper tantrums that could be heard in the hallways when she didn’t get her stylist-curated outfits to jail in time to wear to court.
Sorokin managed to ink a lucrative deal with Netflix, which produced the hit drama “Inventing Anna.”
Julia Bonavita, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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