Former President Trump’s sexual assault and defamation trial was set to begin Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.
Writer E. Jean Carroll filed suit against Trump for battery under New York State’s Adult Suvivor’s Act on the same day the legislation went into effect—Thanksgiving day.
Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, says Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Carroll already had a pending lawsuit against Trump for defamation, saying his public denials and disparaging comments have damaged her reputation. She is seeking unspecified damages in her lawsuit, asserting that Trump caused her lasting psychological harm.
Trump has called her allegations “a con job,” a “hoax” and a “lie,” as well as “a complete scam,” which he maintains aren’t defamatory comments and are the truth.
In an October 2022 posting on his social media site Truth Social, Trump further insisted that Carroll is “not my type”—an assertion he also made during a deposition in October. However, in that same deposition he also misidentified a photograph of Carroll as his ex-wife, Marla Maples.
Tuesday’s kick-off occurs after Judge Lewis Kaplan in the Southern District of New York denied a request by Trump to delay the trial by a month.
Trump attorney Joseph Tacopina had asked for a “cooling off” period following the former President’s unprecedented indictment by a Manhattan grand jury and arraignment on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money paid to at least two women ahead of the 2016 Presidential election.
Kaplan, in denying the request, called the suggestion that the coverage could preclude the selection of a fair jury “pure speculation.”
Jury selection is set to begin Tuesday morning in federal court in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from where Trump was arraigned earlier this month on those 34 felony counts.
Along with refusing to delay the trial, Kaplan has also rejected Trump’s bid to exclude the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he brags that he as a celebrity can get away with sexually assaulting women, as well as testimony from two other women who claimed he sexually assaulted them, as well as evidence that Carroll suffered emotional harm.
PHOTO: Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse, Manhattan
