Tuesday, 23 February 2021 (YJC)_ Former U.S President may soon have to answer rape allegations under oath.
During a December visit to New York City, writer E. Jean Carroll says she went shopping with a fashion consultant to find the “best outfit” for one of the most important days of her life - when she’ll sit face-to-face with the man she accuses of raping her decades ago, former President Donald Trump.
The author and journalist hopes that day will come this year. Her lawyers are seeking to depose Trump in a defamation lawsuit that Carroll filed against the former president in November 2019 after he denied her accusation that he raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Trump said he never knew Carroll and accused her of lying to sell her new book, adding: “She’s not my type.”
She plans to be there if Trump is deposed.
“I am living for the moment to walk into that room to sit across the table from him,” Carroll told Reuters in an interview. “I think of it everyday.”
“The only barrier to proceeding with the civil suits was that he’s the president,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor and now an adjunct professor of clinical law at the New York University School of Law.
“I think there will be a sense among the judges that it’s time to get a move on in these cases,” said Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney.
An attorney for Trump and another representative of the former president did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump faces a similar defamation lawsuit from Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his reality television show “The Apprentice.” In 2016, Zervos accused Trump of sexual misconduct, saying that he kissed her against her will at a 2007 meeting in New York and later groped her at a California hotel as the two met to discuss job opportunities. Trump denied the allegations and called Zervos a liar.
Trump has denied the allegations and called them politically motivated.
Legal experts said it was unprecedented for the Justice Department to defend a president for conduct before he took office.
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