E. Jean Carroll visits ‘Tell Me Every part’ with John Fugelsang within the SiriusXM Studios on July 11, 2019 in Recent York.
Noam Galai | Getty Images
A Recent York federal judge on Monday postponed indefinitely the previously scheduled April trial for the primary of two lawsuits accusing former President Donald Trump of defaming the author E. Jean Carroll after she claimed he raped her within the mid-Nineties.
Judge Lewis Kaplan also denied a joint request by lawyers for Trump and Carroll to consolidate her two pending civil lawsuits against Trump right into a single trial.
Kaplan in a temporary order wrote that the attorneys overestimated the purported advantages of judicial economy and of avoiding potentially inconsistent rulings by combining the cases in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
He also noted that the trial previously scheduled to start out April 10, for the case filed in 2019, “could prove unnecessary” if the federal appeals court that’s currently reviewing the case rules that the suit is barred by law.
A spokesman for Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan — who will not be related to the judge — declined to comment on the order. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, declined to comment.
Carroll’s first lawsuit, filed when Trump was still president, alleges he defamed her with false and disparaging comments after when she went public in a Recent York magazine article about her account of being raped by him in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996 or 1997.
Trump, after the article was published, denied raping Carroll, calling it “a completely false accusation.”
The 76-year-old Republican also claimed that she was motivated to make up the account with the intention to increase sales of a book that included those allegations, and that Carroll, 79, also acted out of political animus toward him.
That lawsuit had been tentatively scheduled to start on April 10 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
But that case is susceptible to being tossed out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
That appeals court currently is considering whether the comments made about Carroll in 2019 were inside the scope of his job as president on the time, under Washington, D.C., local employment law. In the event that they were, because the Justice Department has argued, Trump can be exempt from the claim of defamation.
Carroll’s second suit, filed late last yr, also alleges defamation and makes a legal claim of battery against Trump for the alleged rape itself.
The second case was filed to benefit from a recent Recent York state law that suspended temporarily the statute of limitations that normally would block accusers in sexual assault cases from filing lawsuits against their alleged attackers if the incident had occurred a few years before.
The brand new case also alleges Trump “made additional false claims about Carroll in 2022, more
than three years after she first went public, damaging her repute even further.”
Trump in a Oct. 12 social media post wrote “This ‘Ms. Bergdorf Goodman case’ is an entire con job.”
“And, while I’m not imagined to say it, I’ll,” he added. “This woman will not be my type.”
Trump during a deposition by Carroll’s lawyers mistook a photograph of Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples.
