On Sunday, May 7, former US President Donald Trump turned down his final opportunity to testify in a civil lawsuit in which an Elle magazine advice columnist accused him of raping her in a luxury store department in 1996.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan gave Trump, a Republican candidate for president in 2024, until 5 p.m. Sunday to file a request to testify. Nothing, however, was submitted.
It’s not the first time Trump has ignored proceedings in the case, which he has rejected and termed a’sham’. During the two-week Manhattan trial, novelist E. Jean Carroll testified for many days, echoing charges she initially made publicly in a 2019 memoir. She is suing for millions of dollars in compensation and punitive damages.
Carroll, 79, said on the evidence that Trump, 76, assaulted her in spring 1996 after they met at the entrance to the midtown Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman.
She claimed the event began as a delightful and charming affair in which Trump persuaded her to assist him in shopping for a gift for another woman. She claimed they ended themselves in the lingerie aisle, where there was no one else, and coaxed each other into trying on a see-through bodysuit.
They both laughed in the dressing room, according to Carrol, until Trump turned angry, threw her up against a wall, ripped her tights away, and raped her before she kicked him with her knee and fled the store.
In his deposition, Trump said Carroll made the story up. He called it “a false, disgusting lie” delivered by a “nut job” who was trying to stoke sales of her book.
Trump also repeated comments he made in statements that she was not his “type.”
“She’s not my type and that’s 100% true,” he said.
And he repeated his claims in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which he bragged that men who are celebrities can grab women by the genitals without asking.
“Historically that’s true with stars,” he said.
Carroll sued Trump in November, minutes after New York state enacted a law allowing adult sexual assault victims to sue others even if the attacks occurred decades earlier.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote a letter to the judge Sunday to complain that Trump still has not removed April 26 posts on his social media network in which he called Carroll’s allegations “a made up SCAM.” And she noted that he repeated disparaging remarks about the trial three days ago in Ireland.
After the April 26 postings on Truth Social, Judge Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll’s lawyer, said Trump’s comments were “highly inappropriate” and expressed concern that Trump was trying to communicate to the jury “about stuff that has no business being spoken about.”