(CNN) — Fruit — in particular, tomatoes — was high on Donald Trump’s mind during his campaign rallies, the former president revealed.

In a recently released transcript of a deposition as part of a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who alleged they were assaulted by Trump’s security guards at a 2015 campaign rally, the subject of fruit came up.

Here’s the back-and-forth between Trump and Benjamin Dictor, an attorney representing the protesters.

Dictor: Okay. And you said that, ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them would you.’ That was your statement?

Trump: Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.

Dictor: What was very dangerous?

Trump: We were threatened.

Dictor: With what?

Trump: They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened. We had a threat.

Dictor: How did you become aware that there was a threat that people were going to throw fruit?

Trump: We were told. I thought Secret Service was involved in that, actually. And you get hit with fruit, it’s — no — it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.

Trump attorney Jeffrey Goldman: A tomato is a fruit after all, I guess. … It has seeds.

Trump: It’s worse than a tomato, it’s other things also. But tomato, when they start doing that stuff, it’s very dangerous. There was an alert out that day.

Dictor: Who were you speaking to when you said …

Trump: The audience.

Dictor: So you were speaking to the audience when you said if they saw someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?

Trump: That was to the audience. It was said sort of in jest. Buy maybe, you know, a little truth to it. It’s very dangerous stuff. You can get killed with those things. … I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit. And some fruit is a lot worse than — tomatoes are bad by the way. But it’s very dangerous … they were going to hit — they were going to hit very hard.

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