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Reporting from CINCINNATI — Before he became the king of Atlantic City casinos, before he put his name on steaks or starred on reality television, Donald Trump served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments.

Trump, in his autobiography, recalled learning valuable lessons from his father, Fred: Hunt for bargains. Chase out deadbeats. Spend some money on paint and polish.

Some alleged there was another part to the Trump formula: Make it tough for black people to move in.

In two court cases, built on evidence gathered from frustrated black apartment-seekers, housing activists and former employees, Fred, and, in a later case, Donald Trump faced accusations of systematic discrimination against African Americans, cases that the Trumps ultimately settled without admitting any wrongdoing.

Some would-be tenants were turned away at a complex in Cincinnati, where Donald Trump says he got his start as a property manager. And in New York, the allegations led to what was then one of the largest housing discrimination lawsuits filed by the federal government.

More than 1,000 pages of documents in the two cases in Cincinnati and New York, reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, demonstrate how accusations of racial discrimination dogged the family business from the earliest days of Donald Trump’s career. And they illustrate how young Trump, faced with an early crisis, responded aggressively to charges of bias.

Since he began his run for president more than a year ago, Trump has frequently been criticized for trading in racially tinged appeals, describing some Mexican immigrants as rapists and questioning whether a federal judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of being fair to Trump.

He angered some Native Americans by attacking a U.S. senator as “Pocahontas” and spurring supporters into sarcastic war whoops. Most recently, he criticized the parents of a fallen soldier, suggesting their Muslim beliefs forbade his mother from speaking in public after her husband denounced Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the country.

Hillary Clinton recently began using the discrimination cases in attacks on Trump. Introducing her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, recently in Miami, she said, “While Tim was taking on housing discrimination and homelessness, Donald Trump was denying apartments to people who were African American.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Trump once called the federal charges “outrageous lies.”

“I have always tried to see to it that buildings which we own and manage are well-run and that there is equal opportunity for anyone to rent apartments,” he wrote in a 1973 affidavit. “The fact is that our apartments have the same ratio of minority tenants as exists in the community as a whole. Our organization has never discriminated and does not now discriminate.”

Trump’s father once was one of the biggest landlords in New York, with 14,000 units in 39 buildings, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. Folk singer Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s Brooklyn projects when Donald was a toddler, and reworked his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a protest against the complex’s exclusionary policies:

We all are crazy fools

As long as race hate rules!

No no no! Old Man Trump!

Beach Haven ain’t my home!

At a foreclosure auction in 1964, Fred Trump bought Swifton Village, a half-empty complex that was the largest in Cincinnati. Donald Trump was just a high school senior in a military academy, but assumed increasing responsibility in managing the complex through college and business school.

In his book “The Art of the Deal,” Trump described Swifton Village as his “first big deal.” He recounted, in a chapter titled “The Cincinnati Kid,” booting poor, nonpaying tenants who had “come down from the hills of Kentucky” with “seven or eight children, almost no possessions.”

His experience in Cincinnati “gave [him] a lot of confidence,” Trump said recently at an Ohio rally.

Swifton Village had a reputation as a white complex, said Carol Coaston, now 72, who began working at a Cincinnati fair housing agency, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, around the time the suit was filed. That fall, just two or three apartments out of 1,167 in the complex were rented to black families, Fred Trump’s lawyer told a judge.

“You just kind of, growing up here, knew certain areas where discrimination occurred or you didn’t feel welcome,” Coaston said.

As the Trumps worked to upgrade Swifton Village, they employed a racial quota system and turned away black applicants, according to a lawsuit filed against Fred Trump’s company in 1969, a year after the Fair Housing Act became law. Donald Trump was not named in the complaint.

According to records from the suit and in housing agency files, a young black couple named Haywood and Rennell Cash spent four and a half months trying to rent an apartment, without success. They had two young children and were desperate to find an apartment close to Haywood’s job at General Electric and leave his mother’s crowded house. Haywood Cash said an agent took his $83 deposit, but he was repeatedly told no vacancies existed and “they couldn’t predict any.” Other African Americans were given similar explanations.

Days after the Cashes’ last inquiry, a white woman and a man posing as apartment seekers were told an apartment was available immediately and given a break on income requirements. “She urged that we get over there quick with a deposit to hold it,” wrote the woman, Margaret Faye Boyar, in a statement in the housing agency’s records.

Boyar went to the complex with Haywood Cash. When she said she did not want the apartment, but was instead helping the Cashes, the property manager “jumped out of his chair,” told Boyar to “get the hell out,” and used a racial slur, according to the lawsuit. He “began screaming at me, saying that what I was doing was ‘fraud’ and that ‘neither you nor Mr. Cash can have any damn apartment,’” she wrote.

Fred Trump’s attorneys, while denying any discrimination, tried at first to have the suit moved to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, which could have delayed the Cashes’ claim by a year, according to the renters’ lawyer. But eventually, Fred Trump agreed to rent them an apartment and an appeals court dismissed the agency’s effort to expand the case into a class-action suit.

“Their vetting operation consisted of looking at what color your skin was,” said Gwenda Blair, who wrote a history of the family’s real estate empire. “It’s certainly a one-step process.”

The New York case, filed by civil rights lawyers from the Justice Department in 1973, generated front-page headlines. The complaint alleged that the Trump company used various tactics to discriminate, including falsely claiming a lack of vacancies and requiring stiffer rental terms. The case included allegations of discrimination at at least 17 Trump properties in New York and two in Norfolk, Va.

One of those people who said they were turned away was a then-31-year-old law student from Jamaica.

“I liked the setting, I liked the view, I liked the apartment,” said the woman, Henrietta Davis, now 75. “I am a person who believes that I have an equal right to do anything I want.”

She said she visited the Brooklyn complex and was told a place was available. When she called back the next day to plan her move, she was told no apartment was available after all.

“It was very obvious,” she said. Davis said the agent encouraged her to apply at another, integrated Trump building, adding that a black judge had recently rented there. Davis said she filed a complaint with a housing agency and moved on.

“Look, it’s against the law,” she said. “They were not supposed to have been discriminating, and they discriminated, and they had to face the consequences.”

The court case included allegations from whites sent by the Urban League to pose as renters, who were offered apartments while blacks were turned away, and statements from at least 10 people who worked for the company and described tactics used to discourage black applicants. One doorman reported to investigators that he was told to tell black visitors that no apartments were available; a building superintendent in Queens said he was told to attach a paper to applications from blacks with a letter “C,” for “colored.” He said he was afraid the Trumps would have him “knocked off” if he talked. Another employee said he used the code “number 9” to flag black applicants.

By that time, 1973, Donald Trump was president of Trump Management. Instead of settling the case, he hired lawyer Roy Cohn, who had been a prominent aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist hunts of the 1950s. Cohn launched an aggressive counterattack.

Trump and Cohn denounced the civil rights lawyers at a news conference, and Trump had Cohn file a counter-suit, claiming $100 million in damages to his reputation; it was dismissed. Cohn kept the government busy with procedural protests, and obtained affidavits from some witnesses — including the Queens superintendent — recanting their statements and claiming that they had been threatened. One said the government lawyers had engaged in “Gestapo tactics.”

After two years of wrangling, the complaint was resolved with a consent agreement in which Fred and Donald Trump agreed not to discriminate, to send a list of vacancies to the Urban League and to advertise that their apartments were open to all. At one point, Fred and Donald Trump haggled over the fine points of the ad requirements before a judge.

“We were not convicted. We would win this case if we fought it,” Fred Trump said.

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the judge, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Three years after the settlement, the Justice Department reopened the case, charging that the company was using the same tactics to chase away black tenants, saying that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” was occurring frequently. Court records do not indicate how the second court action was resolved.

Blair, the author, said that the experience in fighting the New York charges helped to forge Trump’s brash, confrontational style — even when facing serious charges of racial bias.

“His whole winning formula is to always be unpredictable,” she said. “You don’t know what he’s going to say, except that he’s going to kick somebody in the shins.”

Tanfani and Bierman reported from Washington. Times staff writer Michael A. Memoli in Cincinnati contributed to this report.

Twitter: @jtanfani, @noahbierman

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July 14 (UPI) — A recent study by Stanford University offers a warning that therapy chatbots could pose a substantial safety risk to users suffering from mental health issues.

The Stanford research study on the use of large langue model chatbots will publicly be presented later this month at the eighth annual ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency from June 23-26 in Athens, Greece, in a study titled: “Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers.”

The study looked at five AI-powered chatbots targeted toward mental health support by analyzing their replies against established criteria on what constitutes a quality human therapist.

The study’s senior author said that, while chatbots are now being utilized more often as “companions, confidants and therapists,” the possibility exits their responses could further stigmatize users or they might inappropriately respond in high-risk scenarios.

Still, their potential can’t be overlooked, some say.

“LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy,” according to Nick Huber, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

Two critical experiments were conducted by school researchers.

In the first, chatbots were presented with fictional outlines of people afflicted with various mental ailments and were issued inquiries as a way to measure any stigma-like natures or responses.

It showed examples of chatbots expressing a greater stigma in disorders such as alcohol addiction and schizophrenia versus more relatively common conditions, such as depression.

But ever newer or advanced LLMs displayed a similar level in bias, which suggested that LLM size and newer advances did little to cut back on stigma, noted lead author Jared Moore.

Researchers tested in the second experiment how a chatbot responded to real excerpts of therapy transcripts that included sensitive feedback on issues like delusional or suicidal thinking.

However, chatbots failed in some cases to flag or counter dangerous thinking.

“The default response from AI is often that these problems will go away with more data, but what we’re saying is that business as usual is not good enough,” Moore said.

For example, a user hinting at suicide asked an AI chatbot for a list of bridges after losing a job. A few bots, such as Noni by 7cups and therapist by Character.ai, failed to pick up the critical context and simply listed the bridges.

Experts indicated that chatbots — while skilled in support roles such as administrative, training, journaling and non-clinical patient functions — may not be fully ready or prepared to sit as a replacement human therapist.

“We need to think critically about precisely what this role should be,” added Haber.

SONAY KARTAL bowed out of Wimbledon – amid more Centre Court line-calling controversy.

Kartal, the last British player in the women’s singles and making her Centre Court bow under a roof closed for daylight play for the first time this Championships gave her all in a topsy-turvy roller-coaster of a match against Russia’s Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

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Despite earning a set point in the opener, the 23-year-old Kartal was eventually out-hit as she lost 7-6 6-3 in a two hours and two minutes.

But the BIG talking point was the latest malfunction of the new automatic line-judging system in operation in SW19 for the first time this year.

Just two days after Emma Raducanu publicly called out the AI judging on the All England Club’s showpiece venue, the last British woman left standing was involved in another bizarre incident.

Kartal’s forehand at game point to Pavluchenkova in the ninth game of the opener was clearly out but there was no call from the electronic officials.

With both players perplexed, German umpire Nico Helwerth halted play for three minutes as TV replays showed the non-call was totally wrong.

Eventually, Helwerth announced: “The electronic system was unable to track the last point”, ordering a replay, which saw Pavlyluchenkova volley wildly and eventually lose serve again.

It was a bizarre moment in a strange match, which saw neither player able to dominate on their serve.

Getting her third break – in those circumstances – could have been the springboard to a victory which would have seen her tournament earnings reach £400,000 – compared to her previous CAREER prize money of £333,000.

BEST ONLINE CASINOS – TOP SITES IN THE UK

But despite a set point, Kartal was unable to serve out before being swept aside in the tie break.

And while the Brighton star bounced back from losing her opening service game in the second set she was crucially broken once more at 2-2, a missed forehand starting to put the writing on the wall.

Kartal refused to give up, asking the ultimate question of her opponent as she made the Russian serve out for the victory.

But Pavlyuchenkova, who matched her 2016 feat of reaching the last eight here in SW19, did not fold. 

Kartal, though, can be proud of her run and she deserved the standing ovation that accompanied her exit.

Pavlyuchenkova, 34, apologised to the home fans after her victory ended Kartal’s dream run.

She said: “Sorry guys. I’d like to thank you for the great energy.

“I understand that she was local and that’s it. But it’s nice to play in a full stadium.”

The Russian added: “I was so impressed with her – but also myself, too.

“I was getting out of breath at one stage but to keep up with these young guys at this age and for me to play at this level is incredible.”

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WASHINGTON — On the morning of Nov. 22, 1971, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s usually stern expression dissolved into a satisfied smile when she read the New York Post’s banner headline: “High Court Outlaws Sex Discrimination.”

As plaintiff’s lawyer in a case before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had succeeded in writing a new chapter in the history of women’s rights by asserting a simple philosophy that she learned from her mother: Women and men are equal.

That idea, which Ginsburg applied in case after case, made her the principle architect of a legal strategy that achieved many of the early legal gains for women. As a result, today’s women live in a world that bears the stamp of her personality, training and experience.

To be sure, despite three decades of progress for women, the Supreme Court still will be struggling with gender issues when Ginsburg–if confirmed by the Senate, as expected–takes her seat on the nine-member panel next fall. Men and women still do not fully agree on what that seemingly simple idea of equality should mean when it is applied to gender.

Further, many modern feminists have criticized Ginsburg’s approach even as they acknowledge what she achieved. Her line of argument, they have contended, has served in some ways to perpetuate discrimination against women. By emphasizing equality of men and women under the law instead of recognizing their differences, they have argued, Ginsburg inadvertently affirmed a system in which women must adhere to male standards to succeed, as she has done.

Nonetheless, her life story has shaped the lives of every woman in America. And the careful, one-deliberate-step-at-a-time approach to a complex and controversial issue that is revealed in the fine print of her arguments on the women’s rights cases casts valuable light on how she is likely to approach her work on the Supreme Court.

Certainly, Ginsburg was well-prepared to succeed in a man’s world. Nurtured by a mother who valued her daughter as much as any son, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1954.

Yet like so many bright women of her era, Ginsburg had been encouraged to venture down a path of scholarship and achievement that inevitably would lead to disappointment. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1959, she could not get a job practicing law because the law firms she contacted in New York City thought married women were mostly interested in having babies.

“It was a classic case of discrimination,” said Kathleen Peratis, a New York City attorney who worked with Ginsburg on litigation in the 1970s.

While teaching civil procedure at Rutgers and doing volunteer work as counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg began to see a new kind of legal complaint being filed around the country and sensed a changing mood among American women.

A teacher was challenging a school’s right to remove her from the classroom when she got pregnant; a woman worker was objecting that her employer provided health insurance only to men, and parents were complaining when their school-age daughters were excluded from publicly funded education programs that were offered to boys.

In those complaints, Ginsburg saw a compelling legal strategy that would win equal rights for women. She would help to challenge a variety of laws based on gender stereotypes, arguing that they violated the right of equal protection under the law provided in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

In essence, Ginsburg decided to duplicate what she described as “the orderly, step-by-step campaign” of the civil rights litigation that led to Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which overturned the “separate but equal” principle. But she would substitute gender for race.

To understand just how novel Ginsburg’s approach was, it helps to remember that gender issues were never even mentioned in her constitutional law classes. Nor did she have the benefit of the vast fund of information that is now available on types of sex bias.

Law school courses on women’s rights issues did not begin appearing regularly on the curriculum until later. When Ginsburg set out to teach such a course at Rutgers, she found that reading the available literature “proved not to be a burdensome venture.”

Until 1971, the courts had held that because men and women had different responsibilities in our society, they could be treated differently under the law. This so-called “separate spheres” doctrine held that men were, by nature, the breadwinners and women the homemakers.

The turning point came when Ginsburg argued the case of Sally Reed of Idaho, who sought to be appointed administrator of the estate of a son who committed suicide at age 19. Her estranged husband, Cecil, also applied as administrator under an Idaho law that said: “As between persons equally entitled to administer a decedent’s estate, males must be preferred to females.”

By arguing that the Idaho law violated the 14th Amendment, Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court for the first time to declare that gender stereotyping was inconsistent with the equal protection principle. Ginsburg viewed Reed vs. Reed as the “awakening” of the court to gender issues.

But despite the enormous impact of the decision, Ginsburg had couched her arguments in such fine lines that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger’s opinion on behalf of a unanimous court did not explicitly acknowledge a break with precedent.

A close friend, Herma Hill Kay, now dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, recalls that while Ginsburg was pleased by her victory, “she did not paint the town red.” It was still not clear to her whether women would prevail in similar cases involving other restrictions.

Kay noted that Ginsburg’s legal legacy for women was built on an accumulation of small gains, not one decisive victory. During the 1970s, as head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, she litigated a total of 20 cases that succeeded in establishing heightened constitutional scrutiny over gender-based distinctions written into federal, state and local laws.

In one case, the court ignored a warning from the solicitor general that thousands of laws would be jeopardized under the scheme advocated by Ginsburg. In fact, the Justice Department submitted a list to the court of more than 800 laws that contained gender references.

“The list proved extraordinarily helpful,” Ginsburg later recalled. “First, it provided a ready answer to those who claimed that with Title VII (of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) and the Equal Pay Act on the books, no more law-sanctioned sex discrimination existed. Second, it provided a stimulus for a next set of constitutional challenges.”

Ginsburg succeeded in challenging laws on jury service, military benefits and Social Security benefits, among other things. She was so successful, in fact, that she predicted at one point that women would achieve the full equality they sought under the law by 1978.

In the case of Frontiero vs. Richardson, an equal pay case that Ginsburg won, 8 to 1, the court stopped short of declaring that gender restrictions deserved “strict scrutiny” similar to those based on race. When only four justices supported strict scrutiny, it was assumed the court was waiting to see whether the proposed Equal Rights Amendment would be ratified by the states.

ERA later foundered amid a conservative backlash, and the court never permitted strict scrutiny of gender differences. As a result, while many gender-based laws have been eliminated, Ginsburg still sees the battle for women’s rights as “a story in the making.”

By precipitating a sea change in the historical balance between the sexes, Ginsburg won the admiration of many young women who aspired to break out of their traditional roles but also inspired the enmity of millions of other men and women who preferred the status quo.

Barbara Allen Babcock, law professor at Stanford University, remembered that some people viewed her as “something of a crank.”

As the years have passed, many of Ginsburg’s own allies also have begun to second-guess her approach to women’s rights. Some are critical of her for pressing cases that were either too trivial or dealt essentially with discrimination against men.

The case of Stephen Wiesenfeld, for example, involved a man who had played the role of homemaker while his wife worked. When the wife died in childbirth, Wiesenfeld was denied the Social Security benefits to which a widowed homemaker would have been entitled. The court struck down the Social Security regulation preventing him from getting benefits.

Ginsburg often chose cases in which gender stereotypes hurt men, according to her defenders, because she thought these cases would be more likely to persuade nine men sitting on the Supreme Court of her basic point: that gender stereotypes hurt both men and women.

Perhaps the most trivial-sounding case Ginsburg brought to the court was Craig vs. Boren, which challenged an Oklahoma law allowing girls to drink 3.2% beer at age 18 while boys had to wait until they were 21. “It’s hard to see that as a burning social issue,” said Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor and author of the book “Justice and Gender.”

Although Rhode is an admirer of the Supreme Court nominee, she noted that many younger women legal experts think Ginsburg should have challenged laws that were of more importance to women. She said that the cases chosen by Ginsburg “left us with a limited doctrinal legacy.”

But the most fundamental criticism heard of Ginsburg’s work is that she encouraged the court to preserve discriminatory laws applying to child bearing and other activities that mark differences between men and women through her arguments that men and women are equal. For example, the court has refused to outlaw the all-male military draft.

“Formal equality has not produced real equality,” Rhode noted. “Men remain the standard of analysis.”

Ginsburg’s critics also assert that formal equality has succeeded in opening doors only for the well-educated, comfortably situated women who are willing and able to play by men’s rules. Rhode said that it has been of less value to low-paid women.

In the face of such criticism, Ginsburg is uncharacteristically apologetic.

In a speech to the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989, she explained that in 1970 she “was hardly so bold or so prescient as to essay articulation of a comprehensive theoretical vision of a world in which men did not define women’s place. The endeavor was less lofty, more immediately and practically oriented.”

Ginsburg said that her approach was the only way to shake the notion that men and women naturally operate in different spheres.

Likewise, Ginsburg has angered feminists by criticizing the court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling, which established the right to an abortion.

In a speech earlier this year at New York University, she lamented that the lawyers challenged a Texas anti-abortion law on privacy grounds instead of challenging it under the equal protection clause. The Constitution does not explicitly mention a right to privacy.

Ginsburg’s views on abortion and her adherence to the concept of strict equality between men and women have fostered a widely held perception of her among younger feminists that she is old-fashioned and out-of-date.

“They call us equality feminists; we feel like dinosaurs,” quipped Peratis.

Still, most feminists are hoping that as a justice, Ginsburg will do what she failed to accomplish as an lawyer: persuade the court to declare gender bias a matter for strict scrutiny.