Now Out of Office, Trump Might Have to Testify About Rape Allegation
Author and journalist E. Jean Carroll claims that Donald Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. She filed a defamation case against him in 2019 after Trump denied her allegations and said she was lying to sell her new book. Now Carroll hopes that she will be able to depose the former president under oath later his year.
Caroll said:
“I am living for the moment to walk into that room to sit across the table from him. I think of it everyday.”
Carroll, 77, a former Elle magazine columnist, seeks unspecified damages in her lawsuit and a retraction of Trump’s statements. It is one of two defamation cases involving sexual misconduct allegations against Trump that could move forward faster now that he has left the presidency. While in office, Trump’s lawyers delayed the case in part by arguing that the pressing duties of his office made responding to civil lawsuits impossible.
Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said:
“I think there will be a sense among the judges that it’s time to get a move on in these cases.”
An attorney for Trump and another representative of the former president did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump faces a similar defamation lawsuit from Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his reality television show “The Apprentice.” In 2016, Zervos accused Trump of sexual misconduct, saying that he kissed her against her will at a 2007 meeting in New York and later groped her at a California hotel as the two met to discuss job opportunities.
Zervos and Carroll are among more than two dozen women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct that they say occurred in the years before he became president. Other accusers include a former model who claims Trump sexually assaulted her at the 1997 U.S. Open tennis tournament; a former Miss Universe pageant contestant who said Trump groped her in 2006; and a reporter who alleges Trump forcibly kissed her without her consent in 2005 at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Trump has denied the allegations and called them politically motivated.
