Trump repeatedly insulted woman who accuses him of rape in newly unsealed deposition

‘She said that I did something to her that never took place’

Donald Trump repeatedly insulted a woman who accused him of rape in a newly unsealed sworn deposition.

The former president described writer E Jean Carroll as a “nut job” and rejected claims that he assaulted her in the dressing room of a luxury department store in New York City in the mid 1990s.

“She said that I did something to her that never took place,” Mr Trump said in testimony taken under oath that was made public on Friday.

“There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job.”

In a heated series of exchanges with Ms Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, Mr Trump said he knew what he had intitially said about the writer’s allegation was not “politically correct”.

Ms Carroll’s had alleged in a 2019 memoir – What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal – that Mr Trump had raped her in either 1995 or 1996 in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhatttan, close to Trump Tower.

• Trump’s deposition unsealed in rape accuser lawsuit as his organization fined $1.6m – latest news

• Judge rejects Donald Trump’s ‘absurd’ bid to throw out E Jean Carroll sexual assault lawsuit

In 2019, she sued him for defamation about he notoriously denied her claims by saying she was “not his type”.

After a law was changed to extend the statute of limitations for cases of sexual assault, the writer added to her lawsuit an allegation of rape.

Mr Trump told Ms Kaplan: “But I’ll say it anyway. She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”

He added: “And you know it’s not true too. You’re a political operative also. You’re a disgrace. But she’s accusing me and so are you of rape, and it never took place.”

Mr Trump and his lawyers had sought that the deposition taken last October to remain sealed as they sought to have the claims thrown out.

The testimony of Ms Carroll, who wrote her “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle magazine from 1993 to 2019, was made public last December, with Mr Trump’s part redacted.

Ms Carroll says Trump raped her in the mid 1990s (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

But this week, Lewis Kaplan, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the court would unseal “all previously redacted portions” of the document.

The release of the excerpts of Mr Trump’s part of the deposition came as Mr Kaplan rejected the request by the former president’s lawyers to have the case thrown out.

Mr Trump’s lawyers term the claims “baseless and legally defective“ while also questioning the constitutionality of New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which allowed Ms Carroll to bring the battery claims against him.

“To suggest that the ASA violates the state Due Process Clause because the legislature supposedly did not describe that injustice to the defendant’s entire satisfaction in a particular paragraph of a particular type of legislative document – itself a dubious premise – is absurd,” Mr Kaplan wrote.

In the deposition Mr Trump also claimed that when Ms Carroll gave an interview to CNN in June 2019, the writer had claimed she had enjoyed what had happened, but that interviewer Anderson Cooper had then gone for a commercial break.

Footage of the interview shows Ms Carroll trying to talk about how she thought some people talked about rape, not herself. However, she did say: “I was not thrown on the ground and ravaged.”

Ms Carroll is one up of 20 women who claim to have leveled a range of sexual assault claims against Mr Trump, ranging from rape to making unwanted advances. He has denied them all.

During the deposition, Mr Trump also bragged about what he claimed was the popularity of his Truth Social network.