By Luke Cohen
NEW YORK, April 17 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s request to postpone a trial scheduled for April 25 on whether he defamed former Elle magazine columnist Jean Carroll by denying raped her. .
Trump lawyers last week urged U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan to grant a four-week “retraction” period until at least May 23 to give Trump a fair trial, citing a recent “deluge of harmful media coverage” criminal charges against him.
In an order written on Monday, Kaplan said Carroll’s case was “completely unrelated” to the process in New York state, in which Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to a payment of money made to a porn star before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence.
Kaplan said there was no reason to assume it would be easier to assemble a fair and impartial jury in May. He said some of the media coverage was based on Trump’s own public statements.
“It does not sit well with Mr. Trump to promote pre-trial publicity and then claim that the coverage he promoted was prejudicial to him,” Kaplan wrote.
Trump’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, declined to comment.
Carroll’s lawsuit stems from his alleged meeting with Trump in late 1995 or early 1996 at a Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan. She said Trump asked her to help buy a present for another woman, but then took her to a dressing room, where he sexually assaulted her.
After Carroll described the incident in an excerpt from his memoir published in June 2019 in New York magazine, Trump told a reporter that he did not know Carroll, that she was “not my type” and that she fabricated the rape allegation to sell your book. He largely repeated his denial in October 2022.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)