Donald Trump on Thursday was rebuked by the judge in his looming civil rape trial over a request for jurors to be told that if the former president did not testify, it would be out of concern that his presence would adversely affect New York City.
This week, a lawyer for Trump, Joe Tacopina, first tried to delay the trial then requested the jury instruction.
In a letter to federal judge Lewis A Kaplan on Wednesday, Tacopina said jurors should be told: “While no litigant is required to appear at a civil trial, the absence of the defendant in this matter, by design, avoids the logistical burdens that his presence, as the former president, would cause the courthouse and New York City.
“Accordingly, his presence is excused unless and until he is called by either party to testify.”
The next day, Kaplan responded: “The decision whether to attend or testify is [Trump’s] alone to make.”
Noting that Trump’s accuser, the writer E Jean Carroll, has said she does not intend to call him, Kaplan said: “There is nothing for the court to excuse.”
Kaplan also said he did not accept Trump’s claim about “alleged burdens on the courthouse or the city” because he was confident the US Secret Service – which protects all former presidents – and the US Marshals Service, in charge of federal courthouse security, would cope.
Trump, Kaplan said, “will speak at a campaign event in New Hampshire on 27 April, the third day of the scheduled trial in this case. If the Secret Service can protect him at that event, certainly the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the city of New York can see to his security in this very secure federal courthouse.”
The case concerns an alleged rape in the changing rooms of a New York department store in the mid-1990s, a claim Carroll made in 2019.
Trump denies it. Carroll sued him for defamation, then sued again, for defamation and battery, under New York state’s Adult Survivors Act, a law that eliminates civil filing deadlines for alleged victims of long-ago sexual assaults.
The trial in the first suit has been delayed while lawyers wrangle over whether Trump’s remarks were part of his duties as president, and thus protected. The trial next week concerns the second suit.
Kaplan said the start date had been known since early February.
“There has been quite ample time within which to make whatever logistical arrangements should be made for [Trump’s] attendance,” he said, “and certainly quite a bit more time than the five or six days between recent indictment on state criminal charges and his arraignment on that indictment approximately one block from the site of this case.”
In the other case mentioned by Kaplan, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsification of business records, related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair he denies.
Since then, Trump has surged in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, notwithstanding the fact he also faces state and federal investigations of his 2020 election subversion, a federal investigation of his handling of classified material, and a civil suit in New York over his business and tax affairs.
In the Carroll case, Kaplan stressed, “the question of the requested jury instruction is premature. Mr Trump is free to attend, testify or both. He is free also to do none of these things.”
Trump’s attorneys, Kaplan said again, would not be allowed to tell the jury he wanted to testify but had chosen to spare court and city the “burdens” of his presence.
