With E. Jean Carroll’s trial against Donald Trump set to start in April, the former president’s legal team has a new gambit they hope will dismantle her case and cast serious doubt on the claims that Trump raped her sometime in the mid-1990s. The last-minute surprise centers on the one piece of physical evidence—an infamous black coat dress—that Carroll says she was wearing when he allegedly forced her against a wall at a Manhattan department store and sexually assaulted her. Donald Trump’s lawyer said Friday that the former president is willing to provide a DNA sample to be compared against stains on the dress. The Associated Press has the story:
Trump offers DNA to compare accuser’s dress
Newslooks- NEW YORK (AP)
Donald Trump’s lawyer said Friday that the former president is willing to provide a DNA sample to be compared against stains on the dress of a woman who accused him of raping her over a quarter century ago in a department store dressing room.
Attorney Joseph Tacopina told a Manhattan federal court judge in a letter that Trump will turn over the sample as long as lawyers for his accuser, columnist E. Jean Carroll, provide missing pages from a DNA report on the dress first.
According to a court filing Thursday, Trump and Carroll are both listed as their lawyers’ first possible witnesses at a trial scheduled to start April 24.
Carroll has sued Trump for defamation and for rape, saying Trump turned a friendly encounter at a luxury Manhattan department store in late 1995 or early 1996 into a violent rape.
She did not speak publicly about it until releasing a book in 2019: “What Do We need Men For?”
Trump has insisted the meeting never happened, including during an October deposition, and his lawyer said the same in his latest court filing.
Tacopina claimed that Carroll and her lawyers were trying to gain a publicity advantage by claiming Trump’s DNA is on the dress she wore the night she said she was raped.
“Mr. Trump’s DNA is either on the dress or it is not,” he said.
Tacopina said Carroll’s lawyers have declined to produce a dozen pages of the DNA report they obtained because “she knows his DNA is not on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never occurred.”
Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, did not immediately comment, though she was expected to file a response to Tacopina’s letter to the judge.
