A federal judge denied President Donald Trump’s request that the U.S. replace him as a defendant in a libel case in which he is accused of raping journalist Elizabeth Jean Carroll in a store in the 1990s.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that a law that protects federal employees from being individually prosecuted for what they do in the exercise of their office should not apply to a President.
“The President of the USA is not a government official in the sense of the relevant statutes. Even if it were, President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements about Carroll would not be within his office. Consequently, the motion to replace the President with the USA has been denied, ”he wrote.
Carroll’s lawyers wrote that “only in a world that has gone mad could it be presidential, not personal, that Trump slanders a woman who has sexually abused.”
A lawyer for Carroll, Roberta Kaplan, said the decision was a clear victory for her client.
“The simple truth is that President Trump defamed our client because she was brave enough to reveal that he had sexually assaulted her and this brutal personal attack cannot be attributed to the President’s office,” said Kaplan, in a statement to the Associated Press .
On the columnist’s personal Twitter, she shared how she was “radiant” with the decision. “The Department of Justice and Donald Trump together cannot stop a woman from telling the truth to the world,” Carroll wrote, adding that “this victory is for all women in the United States.”
Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, said in her lawsuit that in the fall of 1995, or the spring of 1996, she and Trump met at a casual meeting and claims that Trump pushed her against the wall of a fitting room at the Bergdorf Goodman store and violated it.
The columnist says she has a DNA sample of Trump in a dress that she says she was wearing during the attack and asked the President for a sample to prove the validity of her accusations.
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