Trump slander trial of rape delayed; judge denies E. Jean Carroll cases merger

March 21, 2023: On Monday, a New York federal judge delayed the April trial indefinitely for the first of two lawsuits accusing retired President Donald Trump of defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll when she claimed he ravished her in the mid-1990s.

Judge Lewis Kaplan refused a joint request by lawyers for Trump and Carroll to validate her two pending civil lawsuits without Trump into a single trial.

Kaplan, in a brief order, wrote that the attorneys overestimated the purported benefits of judicial economy and to avoid potentially inconsistent rulings by combining the cases in the District Court in Manhattan.

He also noted that the trial scheduled to start on April 10 for the case filed “could prove unnecessary” if the federal states court reviewing the case rules that the suit is barred by law.

A person known as Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, unrelated to the judge, refused to comment on the order. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, declined to comment.

Carroll’s first lawsuit, filed when Trump was still president, which alleges he defamed her with false and disparaging comments following when she went public in a New York magazine article regarding her account of being assaulted by him in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996 or 1997.

After the article was published, Trump denied raping Carroll, calling it “a totally false accusation.”

The 76-year-old Republican is claiming that she was motivated to make up the account to increase sales of a book which include those allegations and that Carroll, aged 79, acted out of political animosity toward him.

That lawsuit had been tentatively scheduled to start on April 10 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

But that case is at risk of tossing by the Court of Appeals in the U.S. for the Columbia Circuit District.

In 2019, that statement court was considering if the comments made about Carroll were within the scope of his work as president under Washington, D.C., local work law. As the Justice Department has argued, Trump would exemption from the defamation claim if they were.

Carroll’s second suit, filed in the previous year, alleges defamation and makes a legal claim of battery against Trump for the designated rape.

The second case filing to take advantage of a new New York state law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations that generally would block accusers of sexual assault from filing lawsuits against their designated attackers if the incident had occurred many years before.

The recent case also alleges Trump “made additional false claims about Carroll in 2022, over three years following she first went public, damaging her reputation even further.”