Donald Trump was fined $10K a day for contempt of court.
The fines will continue until Trump signs the Jackson affidavit.
Jackson fell through a South Bronx stairwell in 1984.
The contempt-of-court fine that former President Donald Trump owes to New York Attorney General Letitia James hit $100,000 on Thursday.
The fine is Trump's penalty for failing to comply with the AG's subpoena for his personal business documents, and it will keep mounting each day, accruing even on the weekends, until he gives a Manhattan judge something called a Jackson affidavit.
What is a Jackson affidavit? Why is it taking so long? Who was this Jackson?
In order to get Trump to sign a Jackson affidavit, the New York Supreme Court Justice ordered the former president to give a first-person explanation.
The judge said that he wanted to know who did the searches and that the affidavit Trump gave last week was woefully inadequate. What were they looking for?
The story of the Jackson affidavit is so critical to what happens next in the AG's probe of Trump's business that it stretches back almost 40 years.
The story began when a woman named Christophena Jackson was almost swallowed up by the crumbling stairway of her South Bronx apartment building.
On October 11, 1984 it was at around 3:30 p.m. Jackson was walking down the stairwell of her New York City-owned building.
She set her foot on one of the marble steps that fell between the second and third floors.
She said that when she stepped on one of the steps, it collapsed.
I grabbed the window to stop me from going all the way through to the second floor.
The entire building was condemned and cleared by the city after it was found to be in such bad shape.
Jackson was injured permanently in her back, neck, arm and leg, her lawyers said.
She sued the city for $500,000 in 1987, three years after her fall, and the city lawyers did everything they could to stop her.
They took a bit longer. The case file shows that the city had to change the location of the depositions of city workers a dozen times.
They didn't budge. The city said they were the ones who maintained the building and had the records. Years of court time were spent because the contractor only handled the payroll for the maintenance workers, not their records.
When the city had to explain why they had no maintenance and inspection records, they submitted a three-paragraph affidavit.
Jackson's lawyers took the case to the appellate court in Manhattan because they had no records and no explanation.
The court ruled that the city should be reprimanded for failing to say where the subject records were likely to be kept, what efforts, if any, were made to preserve them, and whether a search had been conducted in every location where the records were.
The 1992 Jackson vs. City of New York appellate decision can be found here.
If the case went to trial, jurors would be told that the city did nothing to fix the stairs and that they were dilapidated. The city wouldn't be able to counter that.
The city settled the case after the appellate decision.
The decision has become New York case law because of scores of times when individuals and companies fail to comply with subpoenas.
There are other chances that the fines will be stopped.
The Manhattan judge who held Trump in contempt and set the fine has said that he might end the daily penalty at some point, without a Jackson affidavit.
The lone appellate judge to consider the matter declined to do so in a ruling on Tuesday, so Trump can hope that a panel of appellate judges in Manhattan will freeze the fine while he appeals the contempt order.
The Jackson affidavit is named for the injured woman in the South Bronx.
When asked how the affidavit was coming, Habba didn't reply. It's not clear why Trump would rather pay $10,000 a day than not.
"Maybe he just doesn't want to, and doesn't feel like he has to," said a former senior investigative counsel with the Manhattan District Attorney's office who has been following the AG.
As for the mounting fine, it is clearly not meaningful to him, said Scholl, a white collar crime expert who now works for Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss in Manhattan.
It hasn't happened, so it's an account. It doesn't exist. It is an inchoate obligation that no one is collecting on.
The original article is on Business Insider.
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