On April 25, a jury trial in one of two civil cases brought against Trump by author E. Jean Carroll is set to get underway in New York.
Exactly three weeks after former President Donald Trump was arraigned Tuesday in Manhattan on 34 felony counts stemming from his alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, Trump will begin another legal fight related to allegations that he raped a woman in New York.
On April 25, a jury trial in one of two civil cases brought against Trump by author E. Jean Carroll is set to get underway in New York. While a judge put Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump on indefinite hold, the battery case, in which Carroll alleges that Trump raped her in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, is plowing ahead.
Trump and Carroll are both expected to testify in the case, meaning that the former president could soon be forced to return to New York for yet another courtroom appearance.
Here’s what we know about the case.
Trump’s own words will be used against him
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who will preside over the case, ruled last month that Trump’s own past misogynistic comments about women would be admissible as evidence at trial. Some of those remarks were captured on audiotape and will be played for the jury, the Associated Press reported.
Trump has staunchly denied the rape allegations.
“I don’t know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at a celebrity charity event,” Trump said in October, after being ordered by a judge to be deposed in the case
In that deposition, Trump quipped about Carroll’s looks. “Physically, she’s not my type,” he said during questioning.
But when he was shown a photograph that was taken in 1987 of him socializing with Carroll, Trump mistook her for his former wife Marla Maples.
“That’s Marla, yeah,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the deposition. “That’s my wife.”
Despite objections from Trump’s lawyers, Kaplan ruled that the “Access Hollywood” remarks made by Trump — in which he famously bragged about his own behavior when he was around beautiful women — are also admissible in the case.
“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” Trump said in the infamous video, in which he later added, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … grab them by the pussy.”
Other women will testify against Trump
In another blow to the former president, Kaplan also ruled last month that two other women, who claim to have been sexually assaulted by Trump, can testify. One of those, Jessica Leeds, will testify that Trump grabbed her breasts and attempted to put his hand up her skirt on a flight in 1979 from Texas to New York. A second woman, People magazine journalist Natasha Stoynoff, will recount his unwanted sexual advances at Mar-a-Lago in 2005, when she traveled there to write a story on him and his wife, Melania.
Trump denies the claims by both women, but their testimony will be used to establish a pattern of behavior and could dramatically raise the chances that Trump will be forced to take the witness stand in his own defense.
The reason Carroll’s case was allowed to go forward
The statute of limitations for most criminal offenses is decided by individual states. In New York, a law passed in May 2022 extended the five-year statute of limitations on civil rape cases under the reasoning that victims of sexual assault often needed more time to come forward.
Carroll is suing Trump for battery under the Adult Survivors Act, which amended the time requirements for when a case could be filed. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the act is unconstitutional, but Kaplan ruled against them in January.
“The fact that adult victims of sexual abuse are legally and in some respects practically capable of instituting civil litigation against their abusers from the moment the abuse occurs thus is constitutionally immaterial,” Kaplan wrote in his ruling. “The elected branches of the New York State government have determined that many such victims are unable to do so, sometimes for long periods of time. They are prevented by suppression of awful memories or deterred by fear and a ‘culture of silence’ — just as Ms. Carroll claims she was dissuaded from reporting or suing Mr. Trump.”
What the lawsuit could cost Trump
Carroll is suing Trump for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for pain and suffering, psychological harms, dignity loss and damage to her reputation. If Trump is found liable, the court would decide on the dollar amount Trump would be required to pay, though, unlike the Manhattan criminal case against him, the former president does not face the prospect of jail time in Carroll’s lawsuit.
Trump has sought to paint the case against him as politically motivated and the witness testimony from Carroll, Leeds, Stoynoff, among others, could generate weeks of negative headlines as he continues his bid to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Another Trump circus comes to New York
In his March ruling, Kaplan announced that he would keep the identity of the New York jurors secret so as to protect them from possible harassment from supporters of the former president as well as from Trump himself.
“If the jurors’ identities were disclosed, there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted media attention to the jurors, influence attempts, and/or of harassment or worse of jurors by supporters of Mr. Trump,” Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, Mr. Trump himself has made critical statements on social media regarding the grand jury foreperson in Atlanta, Georgia, and the jury foreperson in the Roger Stone criminal case.”
Just two blocks from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse where he was arraigned on Tuesday, Trump’s rape trial will be held at the federal courthouse in Manhattan, which is also just blocks from the New York County Supreme Court building, the venue where N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James will be arguing her civil lawsuit against Trump and three of his adult children, among others, on Oct. 2.
Source: yahoo news
