NEW YORK — Lawyers for a woman who says former President Donald Trump raped her don’t want to question the ex-president before her federal lawsuit over the alleged assault is tried.
“We do not seek to depose President Trump,” said Roberta Kaplan, who represents Trump’s accuser, magazine journalist E. Jean Carroll, in a lawsuit that says Trump lied when he denied the rape accusation.
“He can depose our client,” Kaplan said Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court.
“He can depose the other two women who she told contemporaneously when it happened,” the lawyer said. “And we’d like his DNA. That’s it.”
Kaplan revealed the turnabout strategy of Carroll’s legal team while she argued in court that Trump had bogged down the case’s progression with countless procedural issues.
The hearing on Tuesday was about Trump’s wish to invoke New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which is intended to deter abusive and frivolous libel lawsuits.
Doing so would enable Trump to countersue Carroll for lawyers’ fees if he wins the case.
Ironically, lawyers who wrote New York’s SLAPP law, passed in 2020, said it was inspired by Trump’s penchant for suing his critics.
Judge Lewis Kaplan pushed back against Trump’s bid to countersue Carroll.
Kaplan quizzed Trump lawyer Alina Habba during a tense back and forth that centered on whether Trump can invoke the state SLAPP law in a federal lawsuit.
“As I understand the argument, the whole thing can’t be applied in federal court. Period, exclamation point,” Kaplan said.
The judge did not issue an immediate ruling on Trump’s request.
Carroll, 77, claims to still have the black wool dress she wore during the incident and believes it contains Trump’s DNA.
After the hearing, Carroll said she would never give up her legal fight.
“I’ll never settle,” she vowed. “We’re in this fight for, not really me, but for all women who have been grabbed and groped, and assaulted and raped, who were silenced.”
The former Elle columnist is suing Trump for his statements denying the alleged rape at a press conference in 2019 when he was still president.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump told The Hill in an interview in 2019. Trump said Carroll was “totally lying.”
Initially filed in the state courts, Carroll’s suit has progressed at a snail’s pace.
It was moved to federal court in 2020 when the Department of Justice moved to represent then-President Trump against the charges.
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