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A deposition is a sworn statement. It is not a swearing statement. But Aaron Wider, a mortgage company chief executive from Long Island, New York, seems not to have appreciated the difference. He and his lawyer were recently fined $29,323 for his use of the word “f**k”, and its grammatical variants, 73 times during a deposition.

District Court Judge Eduardo Robreno said he had never encountered anything like it in 30 years.

In the filmed deposition, Wider gets off to a robust start when questioned by his opponent’s lawyer. Asked some polite questions, he instantly rounds on the lawyer, snarling “Don’t f**cking threaten me you a**hole”. Later in the deposition the lawyer asks Wider what the letters in his company name, HTFC Corp., stand for. "Hit That F**king Clown," is the remarkably rapid response (it is really High Tech Financial Corp.)

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The lawyer at whom Wider directs his wrath on the film is Robert Bodzin. Mr Bodzin represents GMAC Bank of Philadelphia, which is suing HTFC in a contract case. It is alleged that HTFC sold millions of dollars worth of improperly secured home loans. The companies reached a provisional settlement but GMAC then sought to sue Wider personally.

Imposing the fine for the bad language, Judge Robreno described Wider’s conduct as “outrageous”. Wider, however, was quite nonchalant about upgrading his impertinence from lawyer defiance to judicial defiance. Describing his swearing as a “constitutional right”, he later audaciously declared that he had no intention of paying the fine the judge had imposed.

He said: "I will go down in history as someone who defied the federal government.” Then, with rising insolence, he said, “I have defied one man who comes from a communist country." (Judge Robreno is America’s first Cuban-born federal judge.) "If he told Fidel Castro to go f**k himself, he would be in prison."

Mutating from a roaring lion to a timid lamb, though, Wider afterwards called a reporter and asked to retract that statement, saying, "I don't want to go to jail".

The earthy vernacular is sometimes heard in British courts but there are also some cases in which the use of language is more sharp than rough. In the Glasgow Sheriff Court in Scotland, when sentencing a local rascal, the judge said, “Although you are a fecund liar, I am going to give you one last chance.” The accused immediately replied: “That’s great, your honour, I always knew you were a fecund good judge.”

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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