By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Donald Trump on Wednesday lost a bid to delay a defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll after he denied having raped her, ahead of a deposition of the former U.S. president scheduled for Oct. 19.
Carroll sued Trump in November 2019, five months after he denied raping her in the mid-1990s in a Manhattan department store dressing room. Trump said “she’s not my type.”
More recently, Trump also claimed that he was shielded from Carroll’s lawsuit by a federal law immunizing government employees from defamation claims.
Trump in September sought to put Carroll’s case on hold, after the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan left it to a Washington, D.C., appeals court to decide whether Trump acted as president when he branded Carroll a liar in 2019. Carroll then accused Trump of stonewalling.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said completing the deposition of Trump before the District of Columbia appeals court rules “would impose no undue burden on Mr. Trump, let alone irreparable injury.”
Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, said in a statement, “We are pleased that Judge Kaplan agreed with our position not to stay discovery in this case.”
Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said, “We look forward to establishing on the record that this case is, and always has been, entirely without merit.”
Separate from the defamation lawsuit, Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, plans to sue Trump on Nov. 24 for battery and inflicting emotional distress.
On that date, a recently enacted New York state law gives Carroll and other people who say they were victims of sexual misconduct a one-year window to sue over alleged sexual misconduct even if the statute of limitations expired long ago.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and David Gregorio)
