FILE – In this June 23, 2019, file photo, E. Jean Carroll poses for a photo in New York. Lawyers for Carroll, who has accused President Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s, told a court Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020 he’s trying “to stop the truth from ever coming out” by attempting to delay her defamation lawsuit and her effort to get his DNA. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers for a woman who has accused President Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s told a court Tuesday he’s trying “to stop the truth from ever coming out” by attempting to delay her defamation lawsuit and her effort to get his DNA.
Trump’s attorneys have asked a court to put writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case on hold until New York’s highest court rules — in a different suit — on whether the incumbent president can be sued in state courts.
Trump denies Carroll’s allegation. She’s suing him for saying she lied.
“Trump, for his part, has done everything he can to stop the truth from ever coming out,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said Tuesday in court papers.
She argued there’s no justification for waiting months for a decision in the other suit, a somewhat similar defamation claim filed by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos.
A request for comment was sent to Trump’s lawyers.
Carroll was until recently a longtime Elle magazine advice writer; the magazine ended her contract in December, according to court papers. A message was left with a spokeswoman for Elle publisher Hearst Corp.
Carroll has said many readers shied from seeking her advice after the president called her a liar.
Carroll alleged last year that Trump raped her in the 1990s after the two encountered each other in a Manhattan luxury department store and went into a dressing room, bantering about trying on a bodysuit.
Trump has said Carroll was “totally lying” to sell a book she published last year. He said he’d never met her, although there’s a 1987 photo of the two and their then-spouses at a social event. Trump said the picture just showed him standing in a line.
Carroll is seeking a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches unidentified male genetic material in skin cells on a dress that Carroll says she wore during the alleged rape, hasn’t laundered and has never donned again, except for a photo shoot last year.
Trump’s attorneys have called Carroll’s evidence-gathering efforts “extensive and burdensome.”
He is also fighting a defamation claim from Zervos, a California restaurateur who appeared on his former reality show “The Apprentice” in 2006.
A decade later, she accused him of subjecting her to unwanted kissing and groping when she sought career advice on two occasions in 2007. Her lawsuit says Trump defamed her by calling her a liar.
Appeals judges last month put Zervos’ case on hold until the state’s highest court, called the Court of Appeals, rules on Trump’s argument that presidents aren’t subject to state court lawsuits while in office.
Both Carroll’s and Zervos’s suits seek damages and retractions of Trump’s statements about them. Zervos also wants an apology.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly.
By JENNIFER PELTZ
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