The former lawyer of President Donald Trump moved last Friday to block the testimony of the previous accusers in the sexual battery lawsuit filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Lawyers also asked Judge Lewis Kaplan, of the US District Court in Manhattan, to ban the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes that were released publicly in 2016 shortly before Trump won the presidential election.
He bragged on a 2005 tape that he liked to “call” women “pussy.” Trump, who hosts the reality TV show “The Apprentice”, boasted he got away with it because he was “a star”.
His attorney argued in a filing that the recording was “irrelevant and highly prejudicial.” She claims her previous allegations against Trump are also inconsistent with Carroll’s allegations that Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the 1990s.
Among those who have also accused Trump is former business executive Jessica Leeds, who says he groped her in 1979 while sitting next to her on a plane.
“He grabbed me with his hands, tried to kiss me, grabbed my chest, pulled me to him, pulled himself in for me,” Leeds testified in his deposition for the case last October.
Another accuser, Natasha Stoynoff, said in a deposition that Trump pushed her against a wall and began kissing her at his Mar-a-Lago home in 2005 while she was researching a story about him for People magazine.
Carroll’s attorney argued that the two women’s stories were relevant because they showed Trump’s “modus operandi to coerce women who disagree.”
Trump denied he assaulted the other woman or Carroll.
Carroll also sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he angrily denied allegations of sexual battery in a White House interview. He claimed that Carroll was not his “type” and that he was just looking for publicity.
Late last year, Carroll filed a lawsuit against Trump under the recently enacted Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily lifts the statute of limitations for one year on civil lawsuits for sexual assault.
Trump’s lawyers have denied Carroll’s rape allegations. As for defamation, he argued that anything Trump says as president is protected from legal action. But Trump repeated some of the same attacks against Carroll on his Truth Social platform earlier this year. He called Carroll’s allegations a “complete job” and a “hoax and lie.”
Whatever protections he has as president may disappear when he repeats these attacks as a private citizen.
Trump’s public deposition about his latest suit was vicious. “I don’t know anything about this nut job,” Carroll said, and he threatened to sue her, according to the transcript.
As for Carroll not being “the type,” Trump misidentified a photo of the writer as his second ex-wife, Marla Maples, during his deposition.
Kaplan has not yet ruled on the request to block the information. The trial is set to begin in April.