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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump angrily lashed out Wednesday, calling the nation’s legal system a “broken disgrace” after a judge ruled he must answer questions under oath next week in a defamation lawsuit lodged by a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s.
He also
called the 2019 lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle
magazine, “a hoax and a lie.”
The outburst
late in the day came hours after U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in
Manhattan rejected a request by his lawyers to delay a deposition scheduled for
Oct. 19.
Kaplan is
presiding over the case in which Carroll said Trump raped her in the dressing
room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s. He called the
lawsuit “a complete con job.”
“I don’t
know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture
of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at
a celebrity charity event,” Trump said.
“She
completely made up a story that I met her at the doors of this crowded New York
City Department Store and, within minutes, ‘swooned’ her. It is a Hoax and a
lie, just like all the other Hoaxes that have been played on me for the past
seven years,” he said.
Then he
grumbled: “Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in
order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can
only happen to ‘Trump’!”
Carroll is
scheduled to be deposed on Friday.
Roberta
Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said she was pleased with the judge’s ruling and
looked forward to filing new claims next month “and moving forward to trial
with all dispatch” after New York state passed the Adult Survivors Act,
allowing her to sue for damages for the alleged rape without the statute of
limitations blocking it.
After
Trump’s statement was released, a spokesperson for Kaplan’s firm, Kaplan Hecker
& Fink, said the “latest statement from Donald Trump obviously does not merit
a response.”
Trump’s
legal team has tried various legal tactics to delay the lawsuit and prevent him
from being questioned by Carroll’s attorneys. But Judge Kaplan wrote that it
was time to move forward, especially given the “advanced age” of Carroll, 78,
and Trump, 76, and perhaps other witnesses.
“The
defendant should not be permitted to run the clock out on plaintiff’s attempt
to gain a remedy for what allegedly was a serious wrong,” he wrote.
Carroll’s
lawsuit claims that Trump damaged her reputation in 2019 when he denied raping
her. Trump’s legal team has been trying to quash the lawsuit 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.”
Trump
doubled down on the comment in his statement Wednesday, saying: “And, while I
am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type! She has no idea
what day, what week, what month, what year, or what decade this so-called
‘event’ supposedly took place. The reason she doesn’t know is because it never
happened, and she doesn’t want to get caught up with details or facts that can
be proven wrong.”
Whether
Trump will remain the defendant in the original lawsuit is 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.
Kaplan, the
judge, said Trump has repeatedly tried to delay the collection of evidence in
the lawsuit.
“Given his
conduct so far in this case, Mr. Trump’s position regarding the burdens of
discovery is inexcusable,” he wrote. “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.”
The judge
noted that the collection of evidence for the lawsuit to go to trial was
virtually concluded, except for the depositions of Trump and Carroll.
“Mr. Trump
has conducted extensive discovery of the plaintiff, yet produced virtually none
himself,” Kaplan said. “Completing these depositions — which already have been
delayed for years — would impose no undue burden on Mr. Trump, let alone any
irreparable injury.”
The judge
also said the deposition could be useful when Carroll’s lawyer next month files
the new lawsuit.
Whether the
rape occurred is central to the defamation claims, as well as the anticipated
new lawsuit, the judge said.
Associated
Press Writer Jill Colvin reported from Washington