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Trump to testify in E Jean Carroll defamation case

Mr Trump’s defence team also plans to call Anderson Cooper as a witness

Graig Graziosi
Friday 10 February 2023 19:49 GMT
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Related video: Trump sexual accuser E Jean Carroll is ‘sick’ of women not being listened to

Donald Trump is slated to defend himself during testimony he will give in the defamation case brought against him by author E Jean Carroll.

New court filings show that both Ms Carroll and Mr Trump will be called for testimony when the trial begins on 25 April.

Mr Trump's lawyers also apparently plan to call CNN's Anderson Cooper as a witness.

Ms Carroll published a memoir accusing Mr Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990's.

In addition to Mr Cooper, Mr Trump's lawyers also plan to call New York Magazine editor David Haskell, who interviewed Ms Carroll shortly after she publicly made allegations against the former president, the Daily Mail reports.

Mr Trump's team filed a motion to push the trial back until the summer, but that request was denied by Manhattan Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan.

Mr Trump has denied the allegations and, as he has done with many people in the past, claims he does not know Ms Carroll.

"She said that I did something to her that never took place," he said in a deposition regarding the allegations in 2022. "There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job."

He said he thought Ms Carroll was "sick, mentally sick" and claimed that she was "not his type."

"She is not a woman I would ever be attracted to. There is no reason for me to be attracted to her. It's not even meant to be an insult," he said during the deposition. "There's no way I would ever be attracted to her. Now, some people would be attracted to her perhaps. I would never be attracted to her."

The former president accused Ms Carroll of using the controversy to sell her book, calling it a "complete con job."

Mr Trump also recently agreed to hand over his DNA for use in the case, but did so after the deadline for submitted evidene.

Despite claiming to not know her, during the deposition Mr Trump reportedly mistook a photo of Ms Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples, the mother of Tiffany Trump.

Ms Carroll said the interaction between the two began when Mr Trump was helping her pick out lingerie for a friend at the department store.

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