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

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A judge has thrown out an attempt by Donald Trump to have a sexual assault lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll dismissed.

Ms Carroll accused the former president in 2019 of raping her in a department store in New York in the mid-1990s. She filed a lawsuit last year after New York enacted the Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which allows victims of sexual assault to sue for decades-old offences.

Mr Trump had asked for the sexual assault lawsuit accusing him of battery and defamation to be dismissed, claiming he had been denied due process.

On Friday, Judge Lewis Kaplan said in a decision denying the motion that Mr Trump’s argument was “absurd”.

“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,” Judge Kaplan wrote. 

He said the New York State Legislature had long recognised the problem of a “culture of silence and the existence of comparatively short limitations periods for bringing civil and criminal actions for sexual assaults and other sexual offenses”.

Ms Carroll, a longtime Elle columnist, first raised the sexual assault allegation publicly in her 2019 book. She wrote that she the attack had occurred during a chance encounter with Mr Trump at an upscale Manhattan.

When Mr Trump responded dismissively to her allegations, saying she was “not his type”, she filed a defamation suit against him.