“We are pleased that on behalf of our client, E. Jean Carroll, we were able to obtain Donald Trump’s deposition today,” the spokesman said, declining to elaborate. Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, sued Trump in Manhattan federal court in November 2019, five months after he denied raping her in the mid-1990s. Denying the allegations, Trump said at the time that Carroll “was not my type.” Trump accused Carroll of fabricating the original charge and said the courts should have dismissed the lawsuit. Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Haba had previously called the case “totally baseless”. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan last week denied Trump’s attempt to delay the case, saying that having Trump testify in the case would not impose an “undue burden” on him. Trump had argued that the case should be put on hold while an appeals court decides whether he was acting in his official capacity as president when he called Carroll a liar. His lawyers argued that Trump was shielded from Carroll’s lawsuit by a federal law that grants immunity to government employees from defamation claims. Carroll has said she also plans to sue Trump on Nov. 24 for assault and battery. Carroll speaking to CBC News in 2019: The Current19:07 Why E. Jean Carroll waited nearly 25 years to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault Last month, columnist E. Jean Carroll accused US President Donald Trump of sexual assault in the mid-1990s. While he denies the allegation, she tells us why she waited so long to do so. On that date, a newly enacted New York state law gives victims a year to sue for alleged sexual harassment, even if the statute of limitations has expired. Carroll, 78, has accused Trump of raping her in late 1995 or early 1996 in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. Trump accused her of making up the rape claim to sell her book. Carroll previously told CBC Radio that she was prompted to come forward after the revelations of the #MeToo movement and the realization that she had been responding to abuse letters in her Elle column for years. “I felt [readers] they owed the truth to the person they were writing to,” he said. Carroll’s allegation is the most serious of more than a dozen past sexual harassment allegations leveled against Trump since he announced his presidential campaign in 2016. Trump has denied all the allegations. The other accusations leveled at Trump generally involved groping and kissing without consent. Trump was caught on tape bragging in 2005 about grabbing women by their genitalia and kissing them without permission, a statement that became public knowledge in the closing stages of the 2016 presidential campaign.
