Tanya Chutkan has been a public defender, a high-powered private attorney and a Jan. 6 judge. Now she presides over Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., case.
Tanya S. Chutkan provides closing remarks to conclude a naturalization ceremony at the National Archives in Washington on Sept. 17, 2019.
When Trump’s attorneys, who declined to comment for this story, claimed they needed two years to prepare for trial because of the millions of pages of evidence, Chutkan pushed back. She said she knew from her law firm days that they would never actually read every document and from her public defender experience that murder cases are regularly tried under far more difficult circumstances.
Chutkan, who declined to comment for this story, was born in Kingston to parents of African and Indian heritage. They raised their children with a strong commitment to education, her sister Robynne Chutkan said in an interview. It was a boarding school scholarship that took their father, the son of indentured servants, from harvesting sugar cane to performing orthopedic surgery.
With their multicultural upbringing and all-girls education, she and her sister were able to grow up free of negative stereotypes tied to their race and gender, Robynne Chutkan said. In their final year of law school, Robert Valihura Jr., now a Delaware attorney, and Chutkan were legal writing fellows, paid to help younger students with legal writing. She was also an associate editor of the law review at the University of Pennsylvania. “She has the right temperament, the right skill set.”After law school, Chutkan worked for four years as a law firm associate before leaving to become a public defender. It was a decision that cut her pay in half, she later said.
Chutkan has said she went back to private practice in 2002 because, with two young children, it was hard to spend so much time in trial and in the D.C. jail. She was weeks into her job at Boies Schiller Flexner when she was tapped to handle the opening statement and the first witness in a multimillion dollar class-action lawsuit accusing a Japanese company of conspiring to fix supplement prices.
A few years later, she was just starting her bike ride to work when she fell and banged her elbow. She called her father, who said he was sure she was fine. So she finished riding to the courthouse, put on her robe, and held a hearing. Only after did she have her arm checked and learned her elbow was badly broken.
Trump’s trial is magnitudes bigger, and Chutkan has so far refrained from issuing a similar order. The government has asked for limitations on Trump’s speech, saying people involved are likely to be harassed if disparaged by him. Less than a week after she was assigned to the case, Chutkan received a voice mail from a woman calling her the n-word and threatening her with murder if Trump loses the next election, according to court records.
Over the past two and a half years, Chutkan has repeatedly criticized attempts to compare Jan. 6 and its aftermath with injustices against Black people or protests for racial justice.
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