The former President of the United States, Donald Trump (2017-2021) presides over the list of witnesses in a civil trial in a lawsuit against him for defamation presented by the writer E. Jean Carrollwho maintains that he raped her in the 1990s, in a process that is scheduled to begin on April 25 in New York and last for a week.
The list of witnesses also includes the well-known journalist from the chain CNN, Anderson Cooper and New York magazine editor David Haskell, who interviewed the complainant, and a friend of Carroll’s whom she told about the alleged rape, which reportedly occurred in the changing rooms of the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue, in the mid 1990s.
Carroll, who is accusing him in this case for defamation (not for rape, which is seen in another case), is also a potential witness, according to legal documents filed in court on Thursday and cited by the media.
Trump is facing trial with a 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 ever since.
However, he has set a condition: that the missing pages of the DNA report that were made prior to the dress be delivered “immediately”, before the former president delivers his DNA, the newspaper says. Law & Crime.
Tacopina has pointed out in a letter to Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis Kaplan, 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 undergo “a physical examination” to provide a “sample of buccal, blood, or skin cells” for DNA.
The former president’s defense also indicated 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 gave the court her witness list, is engaged in a defamation legal battle against Trump, 76, after he denied raping her and made what he calls “false accusations” about her after publish in 2019 his account of the alleged incident in a book and in a magazine article.
Added to this lawsuit is another for the alleged rape, which Carroll filed last November when the new New York Adult Survivors Law came into force, which opens a one-year period in the state to seek justice by sex crimes hitherto prescribed.
The judge has yet to say whether he will consolidate the 2 lawsuits that Carroll has filed against Trump.
With information from EFE
