E. Jean Carroll's Lawyer Warns Judge About Donald Trump
Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media at one of his properties, 40 Wall Street, following closing arguments at his civil fraud trial on January 11, 2024 in New York City. Trump’s second defamation trial in relation to E. Jean Carroll begins on January 16.
E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer wants the judge in Donald Trump’s upcoming defamation trial to take certain measures to prevent the former president from making erroneous statements that could sway the jury.
A civil trial that concluded last May found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine. A second defamation trial against Trump by Carroll is scheduled to begin on January 16 after an appeals court denied a last-second attempt to delay it on Wednesday, leading to a jury ultimately deciding how much Trump owes in damages.
The accusation of defamation against Trump follows the former president’s denial that he sexually assaulted her at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s in New York. In 2019, he said, “She’s not my type,” suggesting that Carroll made up the allegation to profit off her books detailing the purported abuse.
On Friday, Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan asked U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to impose a set of rules regarding Trump ahead of the next trial’s commencement.
She said in a new four-page legal filing that “the Court may want to consider taking robust prophylactic measures to ensure that Mr. Trump does not present inadmissible, prejudicial, or otherwise improper information to the jury.”
One request included “requiring Mr. Trump to state on the record and under oath, out of the presence of the jury, but in open court—that he understands that it is established for purposes of the trial that he sexually assaulted Ms. Carroll, and that he spoke falsely with actual malice and lied when accusing her of fabricating her account and impugning her motives, and that Mr. Trump further understands and accepts all of the limits that the Court has imposed on his testimony in this action and will conduct himself in the courtroom in accordance with those limitations.”
She also wrote that Trump’s recent statements and behavior in relation to his New York civil fraud case “strongly suggest that he will seek to sow chaos.”
“Indeed, he may well perceive a benefit in seeking to poison these proceedings, where the only question for the jury is how much more he will have to pay in damages for defaming Ms. Carroll,” Kaplan said. “This Court should made [sic] clear from the outset that Mr. Trump is forbidden from engaging in such antics and will suffer consequences if he does so.”
Kaplan declined to comment to Newsweek.
The request was made with the notion that Trump would testify during the jury trial. On Thursday, the ex-president vowed to do just that, saying outside a New York courtroom: “Yeah I’m going to go to it, and I’m going to explain I don’t know who the hell she is.”
Trump recently was imposed similar restrictions by Judge Arthur Engoron as part of the Republican presidential candidate’s civil fraud case, in which Engoron decided what Trump could and could not say in closing statements on Thursday, saying it was under his legal discretion per state law.
Trump’s attorneys refuted Engoron’s decision but missed deadlines imposed by the judge in that case.
The trial will also begin just one day after the Iowa Caucuses, in which Trump is currently the Republican front-runner to be the party’s nominee this November against Democratic President Joe Biden.
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