E Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Donald Trump moving forward

The White House previously sought to delay the suit and use the Department of Justice to fight it

Writer E Jean Carroll

A lawsuit is moving forward accusing the president of defamation for saying writer E Jean Carroll was lying after she accused him of rape, ABC News reports, with the start of the discovery process potentially beginning this year, despite various White House attempts to halt it.

“We look forward to finally moving ahead with discovery in the case, which has been on hold since Trump filed his motion for a stay last February,” Ms Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement. Lawyers representing the president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A conference is scheduled to discuss the suit in early December, a sign it could be moving forward.

The Department of Justice, acting on a request from the White House, took the rare step of trying to intervene and defend the president as a government employee rather than an individual in the civil lawsuit, arguing the allegations questioned his fitness for office and thus related to his official duties in office.

In October, a federal judge in New York denied that request, writing, “His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States.”

The president had also tried to delay the suit until he left office, arguing sitting presidents were completely immune to civil lawsuits in state court, but that move was rejected in August, and rendered moot now that he has lost the presidential election.

In 2019, Ms Carroll accused the president in a book excerpt in New York magazine of raping her in the dressing room of a New York department store in 1990s. She’s one of at least 26 women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, all of which he denies.  

If the case does indeed move forward to the evidence-gathering stage, Ms Carroll says she kept the dress she was wearing the day of the alleged incident, which she says contains the president’s genetic material.

The defamation suit is one of a number of investigations and lawsuits the president will face without the added layer of protection the White House can provide, including probes into his finances and potential fraud.