Government

Trump Lawyers Promise No More Delays In E. Jean Carroll Defamation Suit, Immediately Ask For Another Delay

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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President Trump Delivers Remarks On Lowering Drug Prices In Rose Garden

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

It’s not every day that a witness announces in a deposition that he’s not sexually attracted to opposing counsel, but Donald Trump is not your everyday witness. Just when you think he’s plumbed the depths of depravity, he spontaneously announces that Roberta Kaplan, attorney for E. Jean Carroll, “wouldn’t be a choice of mine, either, to be honest with you.”

“I hope you’re not insulted. I wouldn’t under any circumstances have any interest in you,” he went on, adding, “Even if you weren’t suing me, I would have no interest, okay?”

Gross! And yet extremely on brand for a man who says he could not possibly have assaulted a woman because she is not his “type.” Would the obverse inference be true? Well … here’s the former president seemingly admitting that it is only natural for powerful men to sexually assault women who are their “type,” so … make of that one what you will.

KAPLAN: And you say and again, this has become very famous in this video. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” That’s what you said; correct?

TRUMP: Well, historically, that’s true with stars.

KAPLAN: True with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?

TRUMP: Well, that’s what if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.

KAPLAN: And you consider yourself to be a star?

TRUMP: I think you can say that, yeah.

Even for Trump, that October 19 deposition was off the wall: Trump promised to sue both Kaplan and Carroll “very strongly,” acknowledged that he’d called Carroll a Democratic operative without any evidence because he had the “right to be insulting,” and mistook a photo of Carroll for his second wife Marla Maples — rather giving the lie to his constant protests that the plaintiff is “not his type.”

It was ugly, and of a piece with the tenor of this litigation. Just ten weeks before the two defamation cases are set to go to trial, we still await the DC Court of Appeals’ decision on whether Trump was acting within the scope of his presidential “employment” when he made the original defamatory allegation which is the subject of the 2019 suit (Carroll I). Meanwhile the parties are locked in a dispute over expert witnesses.

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In her 2022 complaint (Carroll II), Carroll laid out a second defamation count for Trump’s more recent defamatory statements and a sexual battery count for the alleged assault in the mid-90s under the newly enacted New York Adult Survivors Act. Carroll’s alleged injuries under the battery claim are very narrow — she’s not claiming PTSD or another diagnosable disorder, she simply claims that she was unable to form sexual relationships after the attack.

“The light had gone out,” she testified under examination by Trump’s counsel Alina Habba.

This contrasts with the picture Trump has consistently sought to paint of a crazed woman crafting a lie out of whole cloth as part of an elaborate hoax to bring him down, and it puts his experts in a box as they try to discredit her. Indeed, Trump appears to be having a problem finding anyone who can thread that needle, a problem which is particularly acute since he’s clearly run out of road with Judge Kaplan, who already accused Trump’s lawyers of seeking to improperly delay the trial and seems disinclined to give them any further leeway.

Less than two weeks ago, Trump’s new attorney Joseph Tacopina stood before the court and vowed that there would be no further shenanigans.

“If you say start tomorrow, I’ll be ready,” he promised. “If you say April, I’m trying it in April. I’m not running from this obligation.”

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Tacopina obtained a brief delay to allow his expert witness to conduct an independent medical exam to evaluate Carroll’s injuries under the battery claim. But after substituting in a team of experts who aimed to subject the 79-year-old plaintiff to a battery of tests to evaluate her for “malingering,” the court issued an order confining the examiners to “appropriate” metrics to evaluate “the issues of whether Plaintiff was emotionally harmed by the alleged sexual assault, and if so, to what degree and whether she is pretending or exaggerating her injuries.” The court explicitly barred queries designed to evaluate the credibility of Carroll’s rape claim.

After which, on the eve of the examination, the experts consulted their own counsel and suddenly remembered that they had an “ethical” conflict. Or perhaps a scheduling conflict. Or maybe they had to wash their hair! The precise issue is … unclear.

“We do not now believe that it would be ethically permissible for us to proceed with the evaluation as limited by the current court order,” they wrote, noting that they had arrived at the decision Sunday evening after “hours of reflection and consultation with senior colleagues and three attorneys.”

Tacopina is now seeking yet another delay so that he can find a new expert examiner. And meanwhile the parties are arguing over whether the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape can come in as evidence, along with testimony by two other women who allege that Trump assaulted them in similar circumstances.

It’s not clear what happens next, but … it’ll definitely be FILTHY.

Carroll v. Trump I [Docket via Court Listener]
Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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