As at least the bulk of the litigation heads to trial, federal Judge Lewis Kaplan has denied a push from Donald Trump for the ex-president to provide a DNA sample in a sexual assault case he is facing in return for additional materials covering a prior analysis done of an article of clothing to which his sample would be compared.
That piece of clothing belongs to writer E. Jean Carroll, who is suing Trump over claims he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. She has also challenged Trump — multiple times — for defamation over his antagonistic responses to her accounts, some of which he made while president. Trump himself ensured that at least some of Carroll’s defamation claims could persist no matter the outcome of a court dispute over whether the statements about her he made while president could be considered to be protected by virtue of his role as POTUS. Trump continued maligning Carroll on Truth Social once a private citizen. Carroll and her legal team have discussed the prospect of Trump’s DNA but ultimately focused on different routes for recent arguments, including those supported by a deposition of the ex-president. Trump himself was never particularly forthcoming in response to the possibility of giving a sample — until only just recently.
Carroll says she wore the related article of clothing during the original incident. Notably, for the judge to have agreed to Trump’s conditions would likely have meant substantially delaying the looming trial, which is set for April. The discovery period, in which parties to the case were able to collect relevant evidence in the form of various materials and depositions, is largely over, and restarting that process would require, as Kaplan noted, another large addition to the schedule.
“Starting down the DNA road at this point almost inevitably would lead to further delay for sampling, testing, expert report writing, and depositions of experts,” Kaplan said. “It almost surely would delay the trial again.” There’s also the matter of motions potentially made in response to whatever came out of that process, putting a finer point on it. In other words, it’s not particularly clear that Trump is even all that interested in the additional materials from the years-old analysis. Rather, it seems familiar in how the plan, if executed, could lead to more pointless delays.
Heading to trial are Carroll’s claims directly covering the sexual assault she says took place. In his deposition, Trump established on a series of fronts that he did little to no research before making sweeping statements about Carroll after she first revealed her story of what happened, undercutting the substance of his assertions, suggesting he acted according to what can be judicially found to be defamation, and — conjecturally — showing rather clearly he might be hiding something.
