Federal Judge Restricts Trump’s Defenses At Upcoming Rape Trial

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As Donald Trump heads to trial in a lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll over allegations he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, federal Judge Lewis Kaplan has imposed a new restriction on the former president’s legal team asking certain questions that could be designed to undercut her credibility.

The topic is disputed claims Carroll previously made evidently asserting DNA of Trump himself was present and found on a garment she says she wore during the original incident and still possesses, although even characterizations of the basic and more widely supportable facts could be suspicious from Donald’s team. Despite a past push for Trump’s DNA to compare against whatever could be found on the article of clothing, the former president never made much of any substantial inkling of potentially providing such a sample — until recently, when restarting the pretrial period known as discovery to the extent needed to deal with the analysis could’ve meant substantially delaying the imminently planned trial. That ramification of having gone along with Trump’s sudden change of heart, as the expression goes, suggests an ulterior motive.

“It might be Mr. Trump’s DNA; it might be someone else’s,” Kaplan said on this more recent point, per Erik Larson of Bloomberg News. “The lab could not reach such a conclusion at least in part because Mr. Trump refused to allow the taking of a sample of his DNA for comparison despite a request that had been outstanding for years.” Kaplan himself also previously rejected the arrangement Trump had proposed to finally provide his DNA. Ahead of trial, details like an anonymous jury have also been set, as has the continued separation of Carroll’s earlier claims against Trump alleging defamation from her more recent case, which directly focuses on the allegation that he assaulted her. If the jury eventually rules in Carroll’s favor, Trump could become liable for financial penalties in place of criminal consequences, considering the nature of the case.

Trump was deposed amid Carroll’s wide-ranging litigation, in the course of which he both recommitted himself to past comments he made that were antagonistic towards Carroll and revealed how much of what he originally said about her wasn’t founded in real-world evidence. Asked about accusing Carroll of Democratic leanings, Donald cited just somebody whose name he didn’t share ostensibly tipping him off. He also misrepresented the contents of an interview Carroll did for CNN, suggesting she’d described sexual assault itself as somehow essentially a positive, which was simply false, and the ex-president misidentified the writer as a former wife of his in an old photograph, undercutting his past claim amid these disputes that she wasn’t his so-called “type.”