Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, John Johnson and Ivana Trump at an NBC party, late Nineteen Eighties.
U.S. District Court in Manhattan
Former President Donald Trump recently mistook his rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when being questioned a couple of decades-old photo of him and Carroll by her attorney for a defamation lawsuit, a newly public court filing shows.
Trump’s belief that Carroll, a author, was actually his second wife Maples sharply undercuts the Latest York real estate mogul’s repeated claims that he wouldn’t have even had sex with Carroll because she is “not my type.”
Carroll, 79, first alleged in a 2019 magazine article that Trump, who was president on the time, had raped her in a dressing room on the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996 after a likelihood encounter in the shop.
Trump, 76, denied her claims, accusing Carroll of lying. He also said Carroll was motivated by a desire to generate sales of a book and political animus in making the allegations.
“She’s not my type,” Trump told The Hill news site in 2019.
Carroll is suing Trump, who’s looking for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in two cases in federal court in Manhattan for allegedly defaming her by his characterization of her claims and her purported motivation. One case was filed in 2019, after Trump first denied her allegations, and the second was filed this fall, after he repeated his claims about her motivation.
In probably the most recent case, she can also be suing him for battery, for the alleged rape itself, under a recent Latest York state law that opens a one-year window for adults to lodge claims of sexual abuse that otherwise could be too old to pursue due to the statute of limitations.
During an Oct. 19 deposition at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, which was made public Wednesday, Trump was shown a photograph from an NBC event around 1987.
The image shows him from behind, facing Carroll and her then-husband, television journalist John Johnson, with Trump’s then-wife, the late Ivana Trump standing to his right.
“It’s Marla,” said Trump concerning the photo.
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said, “You are saying Marla is on this photo?”
Trump replied: “That is Marla, yeah. That is my wife.”
Real estate mogul, reality television star and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump was first married to Czech former athlete Ivana Trump. After 15 years of marriage, the pair had a really public and really messy divorce in 1992, which cost him . This might need discouraged a lesser man from ever dating again, but “The Donald” is not any shrinking violet. One yr later he had a recent bride on his arm within the person of actress and socialite Marla Maples, 17 years his junior.In 1997, the coup
Ron Galella | WireImage | Getty Images
His lawyer Alina Habba then interjected, “No, that is Carroll.”
Trump said, “Oh, I see.”
Kaplan then said, “The person you simply pointed to was E. Jean Carroll.”
When Habba repeated to Trump, “That is Carroll,” he replied, “That is Carroll?”
Elsewhere within the deposition, Trump said of Carroll, “She’s not my type.”
“She shouldn’t be a lady I’d ever be interested in,” he added later.
The deposition was attached to a court filing last week by Carroll’s lawyers, but became public Wednesday after Trump’s lawyers dropped their opposition to it being made public.
Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered other portions of the deposition unsealed, ruling that Trump didn’t have a legitimate reason to maintain them out of the general public record within the case.
Trump married Maples in 1993, several months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. The couple, who began their romantic relationship while Trump was still married to Ivana, divorced six years later.
Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
Kaplan has set trial in Carroll’s lawsuits to start in April.
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