A judge has rejected former President Donald Trump’s offer to provide DNA in the defamation case against writer E Jean Carroll.
Federal New York Judge Lewis Kaplan said the offer came too late after years of legal fights in the lawsuit by the writer, who alleges that Mr Trump defamed her when he rejected her claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, according to CNBC.
The judge said that the trial is set to start in less than three months. The part of the process where evidence may be exchanged, called discovery, has ended.
Judge Kaplan also noted that Mr Trump had no reason for putting forward the offer on the condition that Ms Carroll’s defence team be ordered to hand in a so-far undisclosed report appendix on male DNA being located on a dress she had claimed to have been wearing when she was allegedly assaulted by Mr Trump.
Following the ruling, no DNA evidence will appear in the trial. Mr Trump had refused to supply DNA until recently.
The judge wrote in a court order on Wednesday that Mr Trump’s “patently untimely request for the appendix reflects either tactical shift or just an afterthought”.
He added that it’s possible that Mr Trump’s legal team initially decided not to mention the appendix during the last three years because it could have prompted Ms Carroll’s attorneys to make “renewed demands for Mr. Trump’s DNA”.
Judge Kaplan wrote that another possible reason is that Mr Trump’s attorneys had “a negligent failure to read the report with any care over the entire three-year period and thus the failure to notice the lack of the appendix”.
“But whatever the explanation, the effort comes too late,” he wrote.
He added that Ms Carroll’s “counsel have had plenty of opportunities in both of the two related cases to move to compel Mr. Trump to submit a DNA sample”.
“Had they done so, they almost certainly would have gotten it. But Ms. Carroll’s counsel never moved to compel Mr. Trump to submit a DNA sample. They obviously decided to go to trial without it,” he wrote.
When reached by The Independent, Joseph Tacopina, who recently joined the Trump legal team in the Carroll case, declined to comment.
