Judge rejects Trump's late offer to provide DNA in rape accuser Carroll's lawsuit

[February 16, 2023]  By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump's offer to provide a DNA sample as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who said the former U.S. president raped her in the mid-1990s.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said Trump's sudden willingness after years of resistance to provide a sample, but only in exchange for pages missing from a DNA lab report he obtained from Carroll in January 2020, came too late.

Kaplan said Trump's offer would "almost certainly" delay a scheduled April 25 trial and unduly harm Carroll, who has long accused Trump of stalling. Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, is 79, which Kaplan noted in his decision.

"Granting Mr. Trump's request would be only the first step in introducing a complicated new subject into this case that both sides elected not to pursue," the judge wrote. "And Mr. Trump has given the court no reason to believe that pursuing that course would be likely to yield any admissible evidence, let alone a guarantee that anything important would come of it."

Trump has denied raping Carroll.

Joseph Tacopina, who joined Trump's legal team two weeks ago, and Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan declined to comment.

Carroll originally sought Trump's DNA to compare against a dress she said she wore when the alleged rape occurred. She decided late last year to go to trial without the DNA.

Judge Kaplan's decision came in the second of Carroll's two defamation lawsuits against Trump.

Donald Trump rape accuser E. Jean Carroll arrives for her hearing at federal court during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., October 21, 2020. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Both concern their alleged encounter in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, which Carroll described in a June 2019 New York magazine excerpt from her memoir.

Carroll sued Trump five months later, after Trump told a reporter at the White House that he did not know Carroll, that "she's not my type," and that she concocted the rape claim to sell her book.

The second lawsuit came in November after Trump repeated his denial, using similar language, in a social media post the prior month.

That lawsuit also includes a battery claim under New York's Adult Survivors Act, which gives sexual abuse victims a one-year window to sue their attackers even if statutes of limitations have run out.

Both sides are awaiting a decision from a Washington, D.C. appeals court on whether Trump is immune from Carroll's first lawsuit, but not her second, because he was acting as president when he spoke.

The case is Carroll v. Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-10016.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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