New York – Former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021) presides over the list of witnesses in a civil trial in a lawsuit against him for defamation filed by writer E. Jean Carroll, who claims he raped her in the 1990s, in a process that is scheduled to begin on April 25 in New York and will last for a week.
The witness list also includes well-known CNN journalist Anderson Cooper and New York magazine editor David Haskell, who interviewed the complainant, and a friend of Carroll’s to whom she told about the alleged rape, which allegedly occurred in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue in the mid-1990s.
Carroll, who is charging him in this case with defamation (not the rape, which is seen in another case), is also a potential witness, according to legal documents filed with the court Thursday and cited by the media.
Trump faces trial with new lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, who has indicated today, in a twist in this case, that his client is willing to provide his DNA to see if it matches the sample found on Carroll’s dress, who claims not to have washed the piece since.
However, he has set a condition: that they be given “immediately” the missing pages of the DNA report that were previously performed on the dress, before the former president delivers his DNA, notes the newspaper Law & Crime.
Tacopina has pointed out in a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan of the federal court in Manhattan, who is presiding over the case, that pages are missing from the DNA report attached to Carroll’s original lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in 2020.
In January 2020, Carroll’s lawyer had asked the then-president to submit “to a physical examination” to provide a “buccal, blood or skin cell sample” for DNA.
The former president’s defense further stated in the letter that the writer is “using the DNA report to litigate this case in public and insinuate that Trump’s DNA is on the dress.”
The 79-year-old author, who also handed the court her witness list, is maintaining a defamation legal battle against Trump, 76, after he denied raping her and had uttered what she considers “false accusations” about her after publishing her account of the alleged incident in a book and magazine article in 2019.
That lawsuit is joined by another over the alleged rape, which Carroll filed last November when New York’s new Adult Survivor Law went into effect, opening a one-year period in the state to seek justice for hitherto time-barred sex crimes.
The judge has yet to say whether he will consolidate the two lawsuits Carroll has filed against Trump.