Judge rejects Trump’s offer to provide DNA in Carroll rape defamation case

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• A federal judge rejected an offer by former President Trump to provide a DNA sample in E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit.
• Judge Lewis Kaplan said Trump’s offer came too late.
• Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Manhattan store in the 1990s.

A federal judge in New York rejected a conditional offer by former President Donald Trump to provide a DNA sample in E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit. The writer accused Trump of raping her in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.

Judge Lewis Kaplan said Wednesday that Trump’s offer was too late, coming after the end of the process for exchanging evidence in a lawsuit.

Trump is also accused of having defamed Carroll when he denied her claim. Carroll, 79, is a former Elle magazine columnist.

The judge also said that the former president had no justification for making his offer on the condition that Carroll’s attorneys be ordered to turn over a missing appendix to a report on male DNA found on the dress she has said she was wearing during the “sexual assault”.

Trump vehemently denies raping Carroll, who wanted to test his DNA against samples from the dress she said she wore that day.

Kaplan’s decision means DNA evidence will not be presented at all in the trial.

Joseph Tacopina, Trump’s attorney in the case, declined to comment on the ruling.

Trump had refused to provide a DNA sample until recently.

Kaplan’s order Wednesday speculated that Trump’s “patently untimely request for the appendix reflects either tactical shift or just an afterthought.”

One possible explanation is that Trump’s legal team originally decided not to demand for the appendix over the past three years because of concerns that Carroll’s lawyers would have “renewed demands for Mr. Trump’s DNA.” Another possible explanation, Kaplan wrote, is that Trump’s lawyers had “a negligent failure to read the report with any care over the entire three-year period and thus the failure to notice the lack of the appendix.”

“But whatever the explanation, the effort comes too late,” the judge wrote.

The judge also noted that the process of exchanging evidence, known as discovery, is completed. Therefore, Carroll would not be entitled now to get a DNA sample from Trump.

“Her counsel have had plenty of opportunities in both of the two related cases to move to compel Mr. Trump to submit a DNA sample,” Kaplan wrote. “Had they done so, they almost certainly would have gotten it. But Ms. Carroll’s counsel never moved to compel Mr. Trump to submit a DNA sample. They obviously decided to go to trial without it.”

The trial in the case is set to begin on April 25.

Source: The Hill