Decades after she was allegedly raped by a New York real estate mogul who would go on to be the 45th President of the United States, E Jean Carroll is getting her day in court.
Ms Carroll, a writer and former advice columnist for Elle magazine, is the plaintiff in a pair of civil lawsuits against former president Donald Trump that will be presented in a New York City federal courtroom starting Tuesday 25 April, when a jury will be chosen under the supervision of US District Judge Lewis Kaplan.
Those jurors, who will remain anonymous on Judge Kaplan’s orders due to the risk of threats, intimidation or outright violence against anyone seen as an enemy by Mr Trump and his supporters, will hear evidence presented on two separate sets of allegations made by Ms Carroll against the twice-impeached and indicted ex-president.
One set of claims stems from a defamation lawsuit she filed against the then-president in November 2019, five months after she came forward to allege that Mr Trump raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
In that lawsuit, she alleged that Mr Trump defamed her when he responded to her allegation by accusing her of lying in a bid to bolster sales of her forthcoming book.
What Carroll said about the alleged dressing room rape
The allegations against against Mr Trump were first laid out in an excerpt from her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, that ran in New York magazine in June 2019.
In the book excerpt, she said she was shopping at the Bergdorf-Goodman department store in New York when Mr Trump approached her and struck up a conversation, with him asking her for help picking out a gift for a woman.
She then alleged that he took her to the lingerie section of the store and asked her to try on an item for him in a dressing room before pinning her up against a wall and sexually assaulting her for three minutes.
At the time, Ms Carroll said the emergence of the #MeToo movement in late 2017 motivated her to tell her story publicly.
Mr Trump addressed the allegations days later when pressed on them by reporters at the White House.
He claimed he had “never met her” and denied raping her by telling the White House press corps that Ms Carrol was “not [his] type”.
He also accused her of lying to boost sales of her memoir.
“She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation,” the then-president said, adding that her book “should be sold in the fiction section”.
Ms Carroll pushed back on his claims, sharing a photo of herself and Mr Trump together with his then-wife Ivana Trump and her then-husband John Johnson at an NBC party in 1987 to show they had met.
In her defamation suit against Mr Trump, she alleged his denials had caused her “to suffer reputational, emotional, and professional harm” and said she was suing “to obtain redress for those injuries and to demonstrate that even a man as powerful as Trump can be held accountable under the rule of law”.
Justice Department involvement delayed the defamation suit
Although a Clinton-era Supreme Court case, Jones v Clinton, allows presidents to be sued for conduct which occurred before the start of their time in the White House, Mr Trump’s legal team asked the Department of Justice to aid in his defence.
The department filed papers seeking to shield him from liability on the grounds that he was acting in an official capacity as president when he made the allegedly defamatory statements about Ms Carroll. But Judge Kaplan rejected those arguments and said the suit could proceed. An attempt by Mr Trump to appeal that decision failed in September 2021 as well.
Then, Ms Carroll filed a new lawsuit against Mr Trump under a New York law that allows sexual assault survivors a chance to bring civil suits after the statute of limitations has expired on alleged offences. The new case accuses him of battery – and also adds a new defamation claim based on recent posts in which he called her a “con job”.
His legal team took up yet another approach in February of last year, when they moved to countersue Ms Carroll.
But Judge Kaplan blocked that bid in a scathing decision on 11 March 2022, in which he slammed Mr Trump’s continuing attempts to delay the 2019 case as “futile” and in “bad faith”.
“The defendant’s litigation tactics, whatever their intent, have delayed the case to an extent that readily could have been far less,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
“Granting leave to amend without considering the futility of the proposed amendment needlessly would make a regrettable situation worse by opening new avenues for significant further delay”.
Letting Mr Trump countersue “would make a regrettable situation worse,” the judge added.
Ms Carroll is also suing Mr Trump for the alleged rape itself
Last year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law the Adult Survivors Act, which created a one-year suspension of statutes of limitations for rape and other civil claims arising from allegations of sexual misconduct.
The law allows sexual assault survivors to sue their attackers regardless of when the alleged assault may have taken place.
Shortly after the bill signing, Ms Carroll filed a second lawsuit against Mr Trump for rape.
Both lawsuits are seeking monetary damages from the ex-president.
Judge Kaplan rejected Trump’s last-minute delay bid
After Mr Trump’s lawyers made an 1th-hour attempt to once again postpone his long-delayed civil defamation and rape trial on the grounds that publicity surrounding his recent indictment necessitated a “cooling-off” period to ensure an impartial jury, Judge Kaplan said the one-month delay Mr Trump’s attorneys had asked for would have no impact on the potential jury pool in the case, which will be tried in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“There is no reason to assume that a sufficient number of fair and impartial jurors cannot be found on April 25, 2023 or that it would be materially easier to find such jurors on May 23, 2023,” he said.
Will Mr Trump attend the trial?
It’s not yet known whether Mr Trump will avail himself of his right to be present in Judge Kaplan’s courtroom for the trial. But the judge has asked by Mr Trump and Ms Carroll to notify him of whether they intend to attend the proceeding. Ms Carroll plans to attend the trial.
