E. Jean Carroll visits ‘Tell Me Everything’ with John Fugelsang in the SiriusXM Studios on July 11, 2019 in New York.
Noam Galai | Getty Images
A New York federal judge on Monday postponed indefinitely the previously scheduled April trial for the initial of two lawsuits accusing previous President Donald Trump of defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll following she claimed he raped her in the mid-1990s.
Choose Lewis Kaplan also denied a joint request by lawyers for Trump and Carroll to consolidate her two pending civil lawsuits against Trump into a one demo.
Kaplan in a brief buy wrote that the lawyers overestimated the purported positive aspects of judicial economy and of keeping away from perhaps inconsistent rulings by combining the situations in U.S. District Courtroom in Manhattan.
He also noted that the demo beforehand scheduled to commence April 10, for the circumstance filed in 2019, “could show avoidable” if the federal appeals courtroom that is at this time examining the situation principles that the match is barred by regulation.
A spokesman for Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan — who is not related to the judge — declined to remark on the buy. Trump’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, declined to comment.
Carroll’s first lawsuit, filed when Trump was however president, alleges he defamed her with phony and disparaging comments right after when she went public in a New York journal posting about her account of being raped by him in a dressing area of the Bergdorf Goodman department keep in 1996 or 1997.
Trump, just after the post was revealed, denied raping Carroll, contacting it “a absolutely phony accusation.”
The 76-yr-outdated Republican also claimed that she was motivated to make up the account in purchase to enhance gross sales of a e book that bundled those people allegations, and that Carroll, 79, also acted out of political animus toward him.
That lawsuit experienced been tentatively scheduled to get started on April 10 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
But that circumstance is at hazard of remaining tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
That appeals court now is considering whether the opinions manufactured about Carroll in 2019 were within just the scope of his position as president at the time, underneath Washington, D.C., regional employment regulation. If they were being, as the Justice Department has argued, Trump would be exempt from the claim of defamation.
Carroll’s second suit, submitted late previous year, also alleges defamation and can make a authorized declare of battery in opposition to Trump for the alleged rape alone.
The second scenario was filed to take benefit of a new New York point out legislation that suspended briefly the statute of limitations that commonly would block accusers in sexual assault conditions from submitting lawsuits towards their alleged attackers if the incident had happened quite a few years ahead of.
The new case also alleges Trump “produced further fake claims about Carroll in 2022, much more
than a few several years soon after she very first went community, damaging her status even even further.”
Trump in a Oct. 12 social media article wrote “This ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman case’ is a finish con occupation.”
“And, while I am not intended to say it, I will,” he additional. “This girl is not my kind.”
Trump in the course of a deposition by Carroll’s lawyers mistook a photo of Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples.
