In a defamation lawsuit from E. Jean Carroll, a writer who said former President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, the ex-commander-in-chief and longtime public scourge has a deposition scheduled for October 19, a new report from CNN notes.
Carroll is suing Trump over his response to her statements about what she said took place in the 90s. The then-president maligned Carroll’s appearance and suggested she was just trying to boost her public profile in connection to a book. In the time since, Carroll has also revealed she intends to sue Trump under a newly enacted state law in New York reopening opportunities for legal action from sexual assault victims after previously established deadlines under so-called statutes of limitations have otherwise expired. In this case, Trump is trying to get the defamation lawsuit essentially shut down, with a pending decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals about whether he was acting within the scope of his federal position when making the disputed statements about Carroll. The court concluding in the affirmative would likely lead to the end of the case, without further consequences for Trump.
Trump’s attorney wants document production and depositions put on hold before the impending appeals court decision. Trump has often faced accusations of trying to drag out the legal process as a strategy in and of itself, and that’s also the sort of situation unfolding here. Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll in the defamation proceedings, said Trump “violated every deadline that applied to his discovery responses without any credible excuse for his failure,” and she connected these claimed violations to her decision to pursue his deposition after all.
“For example, Defendant identified his son-in-law Jared Kushner as one of only six people with whom Defendant has purportedly ever spoken about Plaintiff or this action,” Kaplan said. “We have requested the address and employer of Mr. Kushner and the other five witnesses… on six occasions since August 23. Defendant’s counsel have repeatedly dodged our request, writing recently that they ‘have reached out to the appropriate parties and are still working to obtain this information.’” Ultimately, CNN says if the D.C. appeals court rules in favor of Trump, it would “likely” lead to tacking the Justice Department onto the case in Trump’s place, which is something his side and the department (starting under Bill Barr but continuing after him) have sought and would essentially end the proceedings because of protections against suing the government for defamation.
Notably, Kaplan also ripped Trump for arguing against his federal role in the Mar-a-Lago documents case while trying to boost it here. “To hear Defendant tell it, he acted as an employee of the government in retaliating against Plaintiff for revealing that he had raped her decades earlier, and in declaring that she was too ugly to rape, but he could not possibly have been an employee of the government when he absconded from the White House with national security secrets,” Kaplan said. These descriptions apply in a slightly less-than-literal sense, with Trump claiming the seized records are, well, basically his, and the Justice Department should back off. He wants the legal connection preserved when convenient — and ditched when not.
