NEW YORK (AP) – Former President Donald Trump is willing to provide a DNA sample to be compared with stains on the dress of a woman who accuses him of rape, though only under certain conditions, his lawyer said Monday.
Lawyer Joseph Tacopina told a Manhattan federal court judge in a letter that Trump will turn over the sample as long as the lawyer for his accuser, columnist E. Jean Carroll, provides the missing pages of the DNA report on the first dress.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, called the offer a frivolous attempt to delay the April trial and prejudice potential jurors.
He sent a letter to the judge saying the sudden DNA offer after Trump refused to give it for three years was a “reckless delay tactic.”
“The time has come for him to face the jury,” Kaplan wrote, noting that the time period during which new facts could be discovered for the trial expired in October.
According to Thursday’s court filing, Trump and Carroll are listed as the attorney’s first witnesses in the trial scheduled to begin on April 24.
Carroll, 79, has sued Trump for defamation and rape, saying Trump turned a friendly encounter at a luxury Manhattan department store in late 1995 or early 1996 into violent rape.
He did not speak publicly about it until he released a book in 2019: “What Do We Need People?”
Trump has insisted that the meeting never happened, including during his October deposition, and his lawyers said that in the latest court filing.
Tacopina said Carroll and her attorney were trying to gain publicity by claiming Trump’s DNA was on the clothes she was wearing the night she said she was raped.
“Mr. Trump’s DNA is in his clothes or not,” he said.
Tacopina said Carroll’s lawyers refused to produce the dozens of pages of DNA reports they obtained because “they know her DNA is not on the dress because the sexual assault never happened.”
Kaplan, though, said Carroll decided to proceed to trial without a protracted battle over DNA evidence after Trump repeatedly refused to provide a sample.
“There is no DNA evidence in this case, and none will be introduced at trial,” Kaplan wrote.
His client “has amassed strong evidence that Trump attacked him” without precedent, Kaplan said.
The lawyer said expert reports showed there was unknown male DNA on the dress Carroll was wearing when she met Trump, but he said it was not an isolated sample of male DNA, but a mixture of DNA that would require complex analysis if the judge allowed the matter to be reopened before trial. .