A federal judge on Monday rejected Donald Trump’s final bid to keep key evidence out of his rape trial next month.
According to The Associated Press, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that key witnesses will be allowed to testify and misogynistic remarks the former president made about women in 2005 when he apparently didn’t realize he was being recorded can be played for a jury that will hear quarter-century-old rape allegations made by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll said in a 2019 memoir that she was raped by Trump in the mid-1990s in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale Manhattan department store.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he never met Carroll at the store and that he didn’t know who she was. During an October deposition, Trump bizarrely misidentified an old photograph of her as one of his ex-wives.
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Trump was shown a 1987 photo that featured him, his accuser and her husband, and his then-wife Ivana Trump. Pointing to Carroll, he declared: “It’s Marla.”
“You’re saying Marla is in this photo?” responded Roberta Kaplan, attorney for Carroll, per an excerpt of the testimony released by U.S. District Court for Southern New York.
A trial in the case filed by E. Jean Carroll is scheduled to start April 25. Carroll and Trump are expected to testify.
