Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, had a message for former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday afternoon: Keep my name out of your mouth or get sued.
He stood with his longtime lawyer, Joe Cotchett, on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco, outside John’s Grill, the Saturday spot on Mr. Brown’s lunchtime rotation, and told reporters that he would sue Mr. Trump for slander and defamation if he repeated his concocted helicopter story one more time.
“He’s never brought a lawsuit in his life,” Mr. Cotchett said of Mr. Brown. “But you know who’s pushing him to it? A guy by the name of Trump.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Brown have been verbally sparring since Mr. Trump falsely claimed at a news conference on Aug. 8 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that he had once nearly died in a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.
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Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Brown, who dated Vice President Kamala Harris in 1994 and 1995, said “terrible things” about Ms. Harris just before they almost plummeted to their deaths.
“He was not a fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Brown promptly called the tale a lie — saying he had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and had never told him disparaging things about Ms. Harris. In fact, he repeatedly told reporters that he respected her and desperately hoped that she would beat the man with whom he had never ridden in a helicopter.
Mr. Trump repeated his claims on his social media site, Truth Social, and threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the helicopter story was made up. “Now Willie Brown doesn’t remember?” Trump wrote.
That’s when Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said he had taken a rocky helicopter ride with Mr. Trump in 1990 and speculated that the former president might have confused him with Mr. Brown. Both California politicians are Black.
Mr. Trump has not spoken about the helicopter incident since Mr. Holden came forward. But Mr. Brown and Mr. Cotchett said they wanted to make sure that he stayed quiet.
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Asked whether he wanted an apology from Mr. Trump, Mr. Brown said he would rather not hear from him at all.
“No, I don’t want his apology,” Mr. Brown said. “I don’t want him to mention my name.”
When asked to comment, a spokesman for Mr. Trump pointed to the former president’s threat to sue The Times but did not address what Mr. Brown said.
Mr. Holden on Saturday applauded Mr. Brown’s legal threat.
“If he’s propagating a lie, he should be held accountable,” Mr. Holden said of Mr. Trump in a telephone interview on Saturday from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m 95 years old, and Willie is 90, and he made the assumption we wouldn’t be here anymore, and nobody would challenge it. Well, we’re alive and well.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
