Judge Lewis Kaplan this week scolded Donald Trump after the former president furiously launched a vicious attack on E Jean Carroll over her rape claims against him as he spoke out for the first time since their civil defamation trial began.
As reported by Law And Crime, Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday morning ahead of the first day of testimony in the bombshell case pitting himself against Ms. Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the 1990s.
In a pair of posts on his Truth Social site, Trump railed against at what he called a “witch hunt” as he unleashed a series of victim-shaming assumptions about her allegations.
“The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM,” Trump wrote. “Her lawyer is a political operative, financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that. Just look at her CNN interview before & after the commercial break – Like a different person. She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky ‘stuff’, then she didn’t want to produce it. The dress should be allowed to be part of the case. This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!”
In the second post, Trump claimed that Carroll and her attorneys “got caught lying!” and that “The Miss Bergdorf Goodman case is financed by a big political donor that they tried to hide”.
“Does anybody believe that I would take a then almost 60 year old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a very crowded department store, (with me being very well known, to put it mildly!), into a tiny dressing room, and …. her,” he ranted. “She didn’t scream? There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this? She never made a police complaint? If I was seen there with a woman-BIG PRESS. SCAM!”
Trump’s initial post misleadingly suggests that Carroll’s attorneys did not want to enter the dress she was wearing on the day of the alleged rape into evidence.
In reality, however, Carroll’s legal team tried for three years to obtain Trump’s DNA sample to compare it with stains on the dress.
Judge Kaplan addressed that issue in discussing the Truth Social posts on Wednesday, asking Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina: “For three years [Mr Trump] refused to give a DNA sample, and now he wants it in the case?”
Kaplan then called Trump’s Truth Social comments “entirely inappropriate”.
Tacopina responded that he would “try to address that with my client” and that he would ask Trump to “refrain from any further posts regarding this case”.
The judge responded, “Well, I hope you’re more successful,” and warned that Trump “may be tampering with a new source of potential liability. And I think you know what I mean”.
