Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, John Johnson and Ivana Trump at an NBC party, late 1980s.
US District Court in Manhattan
Former President Donald Trump recently mistakenly identified rape accuser E. Jean Carroll as his ex-wife Marla Maples when asked about decades-old photos of her and Carroll by her lawyer in a defamation lawsuit, public court filings show.
Trump’s belief that writer Carroll is actually his second wife, Maples, undercuts repeated claims by the New York real estate mogul that he would never have sex with Carroll because she was “not my type.”
Carroll, 79, first claimed in a 2019 magazine article that Trump, who was president at the time, had raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996 after a chance encounter in the store.
Trump, 76, denied the claims, accusing Carroll of lying. He also said Carroll was motivated by a desire to generate book sales and political animus to make the allegations.
“He’s not my type,” Trump told The Hill news site in 2019.
Carroll is suing Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in two cases in federal court in Manhattan for allegedly defaming him by characterizing his claims and alleged motivations. One case was filed in 2019, after Trump first denied the allegations, and a second was filed this fall, after he repeated his claims about his motivations.
In the latest case, he also sued him for battery, for his own alleged rape, under the new New York state law that opens a one-year window for adults to file a claim of sexual abuse that used to be too old to pursue. because of the statute of limitations.
During his October 19 deposition at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, which was made public on Wednesday, Trump was shown a photo from the NBC show circa 1987.
The image shows her from behind, facing Carroll and her husband, television journalist John Johnson, with Trump’s wife, the late Ivana Trump standing to the right.
“That’s Marla,” Trump said of the photo.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said, “You’re saying Marla is in this photo?”
Trump replied: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”
Real estate mogul, reality television star and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump was first married to former Czech athlete Ivana Trump. After 15 years of marriage, the couple went through a public and messy divorce in 1992, which cost them . This may result in lesser men not dating again, but “Donald” is not a shrinking purple. A year later, he had a new bride on his arm as actress and socialite Marla Maples, 17 years his junior.
Ron Gallella WireImage | Getty Images
His lawyer Alina Habba then interjected, “No, it’s Carroll.”
Trump said, “Oh, I see.”
Kaplan then said, “The person you just pointed to is E. Jean Carroll.”
When Habba repeated to Trump, “That’s Carroll,” he replied, “That’s Carroll?”
Elsewhere in the deposition, Trump said of Carroll, “He’s not my type.”
“She was not the woman I would have loved,” he added later.
The deposition was attached to a court filing last week by Carroll’s attorney, but it became public Wednesday after Trump’s attorneys declined to make it public.
Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered another portion of the deposition unsealed, ruling that Trump did not have a valid reason to keep the case out of public records.
Trump married Maple in 1993, a few months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. The couple, who began their romantic relationship while Trump was still married to Ivana, divorced six years later.
Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
Kaplan has set a trial in Carroll’s lawsuit to begin in April.