Judge Allows ‘Access Hollywood Tape’ And Witness Testimony Into Evidence In E. Jean Carroll Lawsuit

The Associated Press reports, Donald Trump Loses Final Bid To Keep Key Evidence Out Of Rape Trial:

Former President Donald Trump’s effort to keep key evidence out of his civil rape trial next month was rejected by a federal judge Monday.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that key witnesses will be allowed to testify and misogynistic remarks Trump made about women in 2005 when he apparently didn’t realize he was being recorded can be played for a jury that will hear quarter-century-old rape allegations made by a former magazine columnist.

The trial in the case filed by E. Jean Carroll is scheduled to start April 25. Carroll and Trump are expected to testify.

Carroll said in a 2019 memoir that she was raped by Trump in the mid-1990s in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale Manhattan department store. She said a chance encounter filled with lighthearted banter turned violent when they entered a small room while teasing one another about who would try on a piece of lingerie.

Trump has repeatedly insisted he never met Carroll at the store and that he didn’t know who she was. During an October deposition, he misidentified a decades-old photograph of her as one of his ex-wives.

In the deposition, Trump was dismissive of Carroll’s claims, saying: “Physically she’s not my type.”

Trump’s belief that E. Jean Carroll was actually his second wife, Marla Maples, undercuts his repeated claims that he would not have even had sex with her because she is “not my type.” He cheated on his first wife with Marla Maples in a scandalous very public affair.

Kaplan had previously ruled that taped remarks Trump made in an “Access Hollywood” tape could be used in a defamation case Carroll brought against him before she filed a rape claim against him in November, when a temporary law took effect allowing adult rape victims to sue their abusers, even if attacks happened decades ago.

He also ruled that two women who made sexual abuse claims in circumstances similar to those alleged by Carroll could testify at trial.

The Access Hollywood tape was revealed just weeks before Trump won the November 2016 presidential election.

In the tape, he said that sometimes when he sees beautiful women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” And he added that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” including grabbing women between their legs.

Afterward, he issued a rare apology, saying the comments were “locker room banter” caught on a hot mic.
Lawyers for Trump and Carroll had agreed that the defamation claim, made in a separate lawsuit, could be tried along with the rape claim, but the judge rejected that proposal Monday, saying the defamation lawsuit could be tried separately or not at all if the Justice Department successfully replaces Trump as a defendant with the United States.

In an order Monday, Kaplan ruled specifically that he would allow the “Access Hollywood” tape and testimony by two other women who say Trump attacked them sexually to be included in next month’s trial, repeating his rulings from the defamation case.

“There is no reason, and Mr. Trump has made no persuasive argument, for me to rule differently,” he wrote.

He also said he will allow testimony from two individuals who worked at the department store at the time of the alleged rape to testify, even though Trump’s lawyers objected, saying they hadn’t been notified in a timely fashion of the testimony and hadn’t had a chance to depose the witnesses.

The judge said lawyers for Carroll had notified them of the witnesses in a timely fashion.

Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, declined comment. A lawyer for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, Kaplan ruled that Trump’s DNA will not be used in suit by writer who accused him of rape:

Former President Donald Trump’s DNA will not be used as evidence in the civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in a New York City department store in the 1990s, the judge presiding over the case said Wednesday.

In a 21-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the time for new evidence in the case had passed and that the matter will proceed to trial without a sample of Trump’s DNA.

Carroll’s lawyers first asked Trump to turn over a sample of his DNA in January 2020 to see whether his genetic material was on a dress she said she wore during the alleged encounter. The request was to be used for “analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress,” they said.

Trump’s attorneys repeatedly rejected the requests, arguing in court filings that Carroll had “not demonstrated a reasonable basis for such an intrusive request.”

* * *

Trump’s new attorney, Joe Tacopina, revived the issue in a letter to Kaplan, offering to turn over a sample of Trump’s DNA to Carroll’s lawyers if they first turned over more information from a report on the DNA that was found on the dress.

Kaplan rejected that proposal in his ruling, noting that it came well after both sides had submitted all their evidence in the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in April.

“There is no justification for such a deal,” Kaplan wrote, noting that Carroll had turned over the DNA report more than three years ago. If Trump’s attorneys wanted information from the appendix that was not included in the report, they should have asked long before now.

The “effort comes too late,” Kaplan found. But he also said Carroll would not be entitled to a DNA sample from Trump.

“Her counsel have had plenty of opportunities” to “move to compel Mr. Trump to submit a DNA sample,” he said. “Had they done so, they almost certainly would have gotten it.”

“They obviously decided to go to trial without it,” he added.

Kaplan also questioned how worthwhile the evidence would be, noting there is no evidence of any sperm cells on the dress. So even if there were a match, “it would not prove or disprove Ms. Carroll’s rape allegation,” he said. And if there were no match, it “would not disprove Ms. Carroll’s accusation.”

“The alleged rape could have occurred without a sufficient quantity or quality of Mr. Trump’s DNA to have remained on the dress since the mid-1990s,” he noted.

Oh man, I thought for sure there was “smoking gun” evidence, so to speak. Apparently not. The DNA evidence is now irrelevant to this case.

[In] a letter to the judge last week, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, called Trump’s eleventh-hour offer to turn over his DNA “another bad faith and legally frivolous delay tactic.”

She noted that previous attempts to get Trump’s DNA were delayed by his appeals over other issues that slowed the case to a crawl and said his team made a strategic decision to proceed without it.

Carroll was “faced with a choice: almost three years into the litigation, she could engage in a protracted fight over an unprecedented request to obtain a former president’s DNA — a request that Trump had repeatedly resisted, vowed to continue resisting, and would inevitably turn into a substantial issue in this court” and with subsequent appeals, the letter said. “Or she could pivot, take Trump’s deposition, and work toward the trial date that the court had already set, armed with the overwhelming evidence already available to her.

“She elected the latter course so that she might prove her case without further delay — a goal that was especially important in light of Trump’s demonstrated pattern of exploding court deadlines and escaping accountability,” the letter continued.

April is going to be a busy month of trials between E. Jean Carroll and the Dominion Voting Systems defamation  case against Fox News.