NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump has agreed to provide a DNA sample in the sex assault case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, his lawyers said Friday.
Carroll, who says Trump raped her inside a luxury Manhattan department store in the mid-nineties, requested Trump’s DNA in January 2020, shortly after she first sued him in state Supreme Court for smearing her name by calling her a liar.
She said never washed the black Donna Karan coat dress she wore during the alleged assault, which testing showed contained an unidentified man’s genetic material, according to court records. Trump’s lawyers outright rejected the request and described it as intrusive.
But on Friday, Trump’s new lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said the former president is now willing to submit a DNA sample. He asked for access to Carroll’s data records detailing what was recovered from the dress, which were not previously submitted on the record.
“Mr. Trump is indeed willing to provide a DNA sample for the sole purpose of comparing it to the DNA found on the dress at issue, so long as the missing pages of the DNA Report are promptly produced prior to our client producing his DNA,” Tacopina wrote, adding it was not a delay tactic.
“Mr. Trump’s DNA is either on the dress or it is not. Why is Plaintiff now hiding from this reality? We surmise that the answer to that question is that she knows his DNA is not on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never occurred.”
In response, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan described Trump’s 11th-hour about-face as an effort to delay the trial and “a bad-faith effort to taint the potential jury pool.”
“Trump’s letter should be seen for exactly what it is: a transparent effort to manufacture a dispute over a document Trump has known about for more than three years, in order to delay these proceedings, put off the first day of trial at all costs, prejudice potential jurors, and ‘take back’ his own past strategic decisions in this litigation,” Kaplan wrote.
“Trump may prefer to put off trial for another day, and he (and his new lawyers) may regret decisions that he made earlier in the case, but that is no basis to again delay Carroll’s day in court.”
Trump’s offer came three days after a judge set an April 25 trial date and months after the evidence stage in the case ended.
Also Friday, Carroll and Trump’s lawyers said they might call their clients as witnesses at the trial.
At one stage in the drawn-out case, which comprises two lawsuits brought by Carroll, the former Elle columnist’s lawyers said they didn’t care to depose Trump but that all they required was a sample of his specimen to prove her allegations were true.
“He can depose our client,” Kaplan said last February. “We’d like his DNA. That’s it.”
In both lawsuits, Carroll alleges Trump knocked her head against a wall inside a dressing room on a closed floor at Bergdorf Goodman. Then she claims he forcibly pulled down her tights, and raped her before she managed to push him off and flee.
She claims he defamed her when he was president by calling her a liar and again last year when she announced she would sue him for sexual battery. Trump vehemently denies all of the allegations.
Manhattan Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, who will rule on Tacopina’s request, has repeatedly accused Trump of trying to delay the case.
The first suit, which accuses Trump of defamation, has been heavily bogged down by Trump’s argument he couldn’t be sued back for what he said in 2019 because he was the commander-in-chief. President Joe Biden’s Justice Department continues to defend that argument, claiming it isn’t trying to protect Trump or the allegations against him, but other federal employees from being sued. The D.C. Court of Appeals is yet to render a ruling on the matter.
Carroll brought her newest lawsuit in November, the one going to trial this spring, when New York enacted temporary legislation allowing rape victims to sue their alleged assailants no matter how long ago the incident occurred.
The lifestyle journalist has said she didn’t speak up about the assault, other than to her closest friends, because of Trump’s penchant for retribution. She came forward when a wave of sexual assault allegations against high-profile men followed convicted film producer Harvey Weinstein’s downfall.
Carroll said the alleged rape caused her lasting trauma and that she has not been in a romantic relationship since.
