NEW YORK — Writer E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday said she would attend her civil rape case against Donald Trump going on trial next week in Manhattan — but the former president hasn’t said yet if he’ll be there.
In a court filing, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said she would be present throughout the trial starting April 25. Trump must tell the court whether he plans to be there by Thursday. Typically, defense lawyers advise defendants to attend their trial as their presence sits better with jurors.
Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina declined to comment or say whether Trump had yet made up his mind about attending.
The case will kick off weeks after Trump’s historic criminal court arraignment on felony charges alleging he falsified business records to disguise an illicit scheme to bury negative information ahead of his 2016 election as president. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is trying that case down the block.
Trump’s latest request to push back the Carroll trial failed Monday, with an unpersuaded judge calling him out for provoking media coverage he now complains could hurt his case.
Trump had asked the court for a “cooling off” period from wall-to-wall coverage of his various New York legal battles, requesting Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan delay the case brought by Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the mid-1990s, by more than a month.
Kaplan acknowledged the recent flood of headlines but said Trump brought much of it on himself.
“Although there was a great deal of media coverage of the expected New York charges and then of the indictment and of Mr. Trump’s arraignment, Mr. Trump’s argument breaks down at every subsequent step,” Kaplan wrote in a Monday ruling.
“(It) bears emphasis that at least some portion of the recent media coverage of Mr. Trump’s indictment was of his own doing ... It does not sit well for Mr. Trump to promote pretrial publicity and then to claim that coverage that he promoted was prejudicial to him and should be taken into account as supporting a further delay.”
Back-to-back media coverage of DA Alvin Bragg’s Trump investigation commenced weeks before a grand jury returned an indictment when Trump wrongly predicted his arrest in a Truth Social post. Trump urged his supporters to protest the criminal action, prompting the DA’s office and the courts to be inundated with death threats, bogus bomb threats, and white powder scares.
He has further fanned flames by bashing the judge presiding over his criminal case, state Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, DA Alvin Bragg and their relatives.
Kaplan previously cited Trump’s comments criticizing jurors and statements perceived as incitement to violence in deciding the jury at his and Carroll’s trial will be anonymous.
The judge’s latest ruling rejected Trump’s argument that recent news stories could prejudice jurors, with Trump’s lawyers arguing details in Carroll’s civil case go to the heart of allegations in his criminal case, which documents efforts to bury coverage of an alleged 2006 extramarital tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels.
The jurist said one key difference is the alleged sexual encounter in the criminal case was consensual.
“To be sure, at a certain level of generality, both cases do indeed have something to do with ‘sex.’ But the ‘something’ that each has to do with it is dramatically different,” Kaplan wrote.
“In the New York State case, the sex (if there was any) was between consenting adults. Its significance to the New York indictment, to whatever extent it has any, is only that a desire to conceal the consensual relationship allegedly was a motive for the alleged hush money payment and the alleged falsification of the business records. In this case, on the other hand, the sex (if there was any) was rape.”
Trump has denied the alleged sexual assault, which Carroll, 79, said happened in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman when Trump asked her to help him pick out lingerie to gift to another woman. The former president has denied even meeting Carroll, wrongly identifying her as his ex-wife, Marla Maples, when shown a picture of him talking to her during a deposition with Carroll’s legal team last year.
———
