U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has denied a request to delay civil rape and defamation trial involving former President Donald Trump.
Late last year, the state of New York instituted the Adult Survivors Act. From November 24, 2022 through November 24, 2023, the act removes the statute of limitations for certain claims regarding past sexual offenses. Minutes after the act was formally put in place, former columnist E. Jean Carroll filed a civil rape and defamation lawsuit against the former President. Carroll has repeatedly stated Trump raped her in the dressing room of a department store in Manhattan in the mid 1990s. Since the claims were brought to the public conscious in 2019, the former President has repeatedly denied that he raped the former columnist. Most notably, he has said that the interaction could not have happened because she is “not [his] type.”
The lawsuit brought against the former President are scheduled to be examined in trial beginning April 25. After the former President was indicted in an unrelated case, Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, attempted to delay the state of the trial by four weeks. One week before the start of the trial, Judge Kaplan has ruled that the court proceedings will move forward as previously scheduled.
“This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution,” Kaplan wrote in a 10-page opinion.
“The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment — coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump’s own actions — would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation. So too is his suggestion that a month’s delay of the start of this trial would ‘cool off’ anything, even if any ‘cooling off’ were necessary.”
