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In 2019, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of raping her in a department-store fitting room in the 1990s. Trump vehemently denied the allegation and called her a liar, prompting Carroll, a former magazine writer, to sue him for defamation. The case has been ongoing, and Trump has long been trying to avoid sitting for a deposition. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled last week that the former will have to testify. He did so on Wednesday, although it isn’t clear if Trump actually answered questions.
“We’re pleased that on behalf of our client, E. Jean Carroll, we were able to take Donald Trump’s deposition today,” a spokesperson for Kaplan Hecker & Fink, the law firm representing Carroll, said in a statement. “We are not able to comment further.”
The deposition was taken at Mar-a-Lago and came exactly a week after Kaplan’s ruling. “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,” Kaplan explained last week, adding that Trump’s push to delay the proceedings while producing almost no documents was “inexcusable.”
The defamation case has been under appeal for nearly two years, but Kaplan didn’t see its contested status as justification for delaying Trump’s deposition. “Completing those depositions — which have already been delayed for years — would impose no undue burden on Mr. Trump, let alone any irreparable injury,” he wrote.
Carroll alleged Trump raped her in her 2019 book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. Trump responded by saying Carroll was “not my type” while categorically denying the incident took place. “Totally lying. I don’t know anything about her,” Trump told The Hill. “I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her. She is — it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that.”
Carroll sued Trump for defamation a few months later, and Trump has been contesting the case ever since, even alleging Carroll is violating his right to free speech by suing him. Carroll has remained steadfast. “I’ll never settle,” she said outside a New York City courtroom earlier this year. “We’re in this fight, not really for me, but for all women who have been grabbed and groped, and assaulted and raped, who were silenced.”
Carroll announced late last month that she intends to file a new lawsuit against Trump after GovernorKathy Hochul signed a law allowing sexual assault victims a one-time opportunity to file civil lawsuits even if statutes of limitations have expired. “We are pleased that Judge Kaplan agreed with our position not to stay discovery in this case,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement provided to Rolling Stone last week. “We look forward to filing our case under the Adult Survivors Act and moving forward to trial with all dispatch.”
