Just weeks after his historic arraignment on criminal charges related to a hush-money payment made to a porn star just before the 2016 election, jury selection is set to begin in a civil trial pitting Donald Trump against a well-known former American columnist who claims he raped her in the 1990s.
E. Jean Carroll, 79, claims that after being sexually attacked by Trump in a New York department shop, he defamed her after she came up with the claims.
Trump, who is dealing with a number of legal issues that could jeopardise his bid for a second term in office in 2024, refutes the accusations.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, claims that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of the opulent Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the middle of the 1990s.
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Carroll, who made the claim for the first time in a book extract made available by New York Magazine in 2019, claimed the incident happened after Trump asked her for assistance on shopping.
Then, in his response, Trump claimed that he had never met Carroll, that she was “not my type,” and that she was “totally lying.”
Carroll initially filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in 2019, but she was unable to add a rape allegation since the statute of limitations for the purported crime had already passed.
However, a new legislation that went into effect in New York in November of last year provides compensation to victims of sexual assault who may have been assaulted decades earlier and offers them a one-year window to file a lawsuit against their accused perpetrators, regardless of how long ago the alleged abuse occurred.
Carroll’s attorneys have brought a new lawsuit against Trump, accusing him of battery “when he forcibly raped and groped” her.
