US authorities in New York State will begin jury selection on Tuesday in a civil trial brought by a columnist, E. Jean Carroll, against former US President Donald Trump.
E. Jean Carroll, 79, claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store in the 1990s, and then defamed her after she went public with the allegations years later.
Trump has, however, denied the allegations.
Trump’s latest ordeal is coming weeks after he was arraigned on criminal charges related to a hush-money payment made to a porn star just before the 2016 election.
Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, said she was raped by Trump in the changing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, after Trump reportedly asked her for shopping advice. An allegation she first made in an excerpt from her book published by New York Magazine in 2019.
Trump, however, responded then by saying he never met Carroll, that she was “not my type” and that she was “totally lying.”
Though Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 but was unable to include the rape claim because the statute of limitations for the alleged offense had expired. A new law, which took effect in November last year in New York, however gives redress to victims of sexual assault decades after attacks may have occurred.
Carroll’s Lawyers filed a new suit that accused Trump of battery, “when he forcibly raped and groped” her, including defamation for a post that Trump made on his Truth Social platform where he denied the alleged rape and referred to Carroll as a “complete con job.”