Editor’s note: This story includes an outline of sexual assault.
A federal judge in Latest York on Friday rejected an effort by lawyers for former President Donald Trump to maintain sealed a portion of the transcript of his deposition in a lawsuit by a author who accuses him of raping her within the mid-Nineteen Nineties.
Trump’s arguments for keeping the nearly three dozen pages of his deposition sealed “are entirely baseless,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
That deposition showed Trump making insulting comments in regards to the author who’s suing him, E. Jean Carroll, her lawyer, and President Joe Biden, in addition to grousing about what he called a series of “hoaxes” involving allegedly false claims made about him.
The deposition which was conducted on Oct. 19 by lawyers for Carroll at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Earlier Friday, Kaplan denied Trump’s bid to toss out considered one of the 2 lawsuits filed against him by Carroll, who says Trump raped her in a dressing room within the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan greater than twenty years ago.
In his unsealing order, Kaplan said that Trump had no right to confidentiality for his testimony when he gave it. The judge noted that there’s a presumptive right held by the general public to court documents.
The judge added that contrary to Trump’s argument, the portion of his transcript that was redacted in the general public filing by Carroll’s lawyers “was directly relevant” to a disagreement between those attorneys and his over whether additional discovery ought to be conducted for her second lawsuit.
Kaplan first ordered the transcript unsealed on Monday. But he then reversed his order after Trump’s lawyers asked him for 3 days to file arguments opposing the unsealing.
Trump, while serving as president, publicly accused Carroll of creating up the rape allegation, saying she was motivated by politics and a desire to sell a book containing her claims.
Carroll then sued him for defamation.
She sued him again in November when he made what she says were other defamatory statements about her in a social media post that Trump wrote in October. Her second lawsuit also alleges battery, a claim that was allowed under a latest Latest York state law that enables adults a one-year grace period to file lawsuits alleging sexual abuse that occurred outside of the time-frame allowed by the statute of limitations.
Trial within the cases has been set for April.
“It is a false accusation,” Trump said in his deposition, in keeping with the newly disclosed transcript. “Never happened, never would occur.”
“I’ll sue her after that is over, and that is the thing I actually look ahead to doing,” Trump told Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who will not be related to the judge.
“And I’ll sue you too.”
Trump throughout the deposition was asked in regards to the Oct. 12 post he made on his social media site, which refers back to the “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman case,” calling it “a whole con job.”
The post referenced a June 2019 interview Carroll gave CNN’s Anderson Cooper that described her account of the alleged sexual assault. She said it occurred after a likelihood meeting with Trump while she was shopping, and he allegedly asked her for help buying a gift “for a woman.”
“She completely made up a story that I met her on the doors of this crowded Latest York City department store and inside minutes ‘swooned’ her,” Trump had written, Kaplan noted in her questioning.
Trump in his deposition confirmed Kaplan had read that, and the remaining of the post accurately, saying, “Great statement, yeah. True. True.”
“I wrote all of it myself,” he added.
Asked if he had talked to anyone about what to say in his post, Trump replied, “No, I didn’t must. I’m not Joe Biden.”
Trump called Carroll a “wack job” during his deposition.
“I believe she’s sick, mentally sick,” he said.
Kaplan then asked him about his use of the word “swooned,” which she called “an odd word.”
“What does ‘swooned her’ mean?” the attorney asked.
Trump replied, “That may be a word, possibly accurate or not, having to do with talking to her and talking her — to do an act that she said happened, which didn’t occur.”
“And it is a nicer word than the word that starts with an F, and this could be a word that I used because I believed it will be inappropriate to make use of the opposite word,” Trump said. “And it didn’t occur.”
When Kaplan said that the dictionary defined “swooned” as “to faint with extreme emotion,” Trump replied, “Well, form of that is what she said I did to her.”
“She fainted with great emotion,” Trump said. “She actually indicated that she loved it. OK?,” he said, referring to Carroll’s CNN interview.
“She loved it until business break,” Trump said. “Actually, I believe she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Kaplan then asked if Trump was testifying that Carroll “said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you.”
Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I think that is what took place. And we are able to define that. You’ll need to point out that. I’m sure you are going to show that. But she was interviewed by Anderson Cooper, and I believe she said that rape was sexy — which it is not, by the way in which.”
He added, “But I believe she said that rape was sexy.”
Actually, Carroll had said in that interview that she believed “most individuals” considered rape as “sexy.” She didn’t say she believed that herself.
In that interview, Carroll said she was “panicked” when Trump shut the door of the dressing room and pushed her against a wall and started kissing her before knocking down her tights.
“And it was against my will. And it hurt. And it was a fight,” Carroll said within the interview.
She later said in the identical interview, “I used to be not thrown on the bottom and ravished. Which the word ‘rape’ carries so many sexual connotations.”
“This was not — this was not sexual. It just hurt,” Carroll said.
Cooper responded, “I believe most individuals consider rape as … a violent assault.”
Carroll then said, “I believe most individuals consider rape as being sexy.”
When her lawyer Kaplan asked Trump if it was not true that Carroll had said it was a view of many other people about rape being sexy, he said, “Oh, I do not know … All I do know is, I think she said rape is sexy or something to that effect, but you will have to observe the interview. It has been some time.”
Trump later within the deposition noted that in his social media post he made what he called the “not politically correct statement” about Carroll.
“She’s not my type,” Trump told Kaplan. “She will not be a lady I might ever be drawn to,” he added later.
“She’s accusing me of rape, a lady I do not know who she is,” Trump said. “The worst thing you’ll be able to do, the worst charge.”
“And you understand it is not true too,” he told Kaplan. “You are a political operative too. You are a disgrace.”
He later suggested that Kaplan had some form of influence with the judge within the case to get him to grant her permission to depose him for the lawsuit. It’s standard in lawsuits for attorneys to depose the parties in a case.
“I knew that we would be wasting a day doing this, an entire day doing this,” Trump said. “You’ve to be connected to get this sort of time. But an entire day of doing these things on something that never happened.”
Kaplan noted that Trump had said in his social media post that Carroll’s allegation was “a hoax and a lie, similar to all the opposite hoaxes which were played on me for the past seven years.”
When the lawyer asked if he meant Carroll had fabricated her claim, Trump said, “Totally, one hundred pc.” He admitted that he used the term “hoax” rather a lot.
“I’ve had numerous hoaxes played on me. That is considered one of them,” Trump said.
Asked what a few of those were, Trump said, “The Russia Russia Russia hoax … Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine hoax.”
He pointed to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential connections between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Trump also said the usage of mail ballots throughout the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, was a hoax.
“I believe they’re very dishonest. Mail-in ballots, very dishonest,” Trump said.
Asked by Kaplan if he had himself voted by mail, Trump answered over the objections of his own lawyer, Alina Habba.
“I do. I do,” Trump said. “Sometimes I do. But I do not know what happens to it when you give it. I do not know.”