Donald Trump must answer questions while under oath next week after U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected his request to delay questioning in the defamation lawsuit brought by a advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says he raped her in the mid-1990s, the Associated Press reports.
Trump has denied Carroll’s accusation that he raped her in an upscale Manhattan department store’s dressing room. Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said she was pleased with the ruling and looked forward to filing the new claims next month “and moving forward to trial with all dispatch.”
From the AP:
Carroll’s lawsuit claims that Trump damaged her reputation in 2019 when he denied raping her. Trump’s legal team has been trying to squash the suit by arguing that the Republican was just doing his job as president when he denied the allegations, including when he dismissed his accuser as “not my type.”
That’s a key question because if Trump was acting within the scope of his duties as a federal employee, the U.S. government would become the defendant in the case.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a split decision last month that Trump was a federal employee when he commented on Carroll’s claims. But it asked another court in Washington to decide whether Trump’s public statements occurred during the scope of his employment.
In a written statement, Judge Kaplan said Trump’s behavior in the case was “inexcusable.”
“As this Court previously has observed, Mr. Trump has litigated this case since it began in 2019 with the effect and probably the purpose of delaying it,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
“Mr. Trump has conducted extensive discovery of the plaintiff, yet produced virtually none himself,” Kaplan continued. “Completing these depositions — which already have been delayed for years — would impose no undue burden on Mr. Trump, let alone any irreparable injury.”
Read the full report over at the Associated Press.
