MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal judge on Friday rejected Donald Trump's fourth request to dodge columnist E. Jean Carroll's defamation case, calling the bid "yet another such attempt to delay unduly the resolution" of the suit and asserting that repeated appeals on the grounds of an alleged presidential immunity are "frivolous."
“In sum, Mr. Trump has not provided a single reason for the court to find that there is any likelihood that he will succeed on appeal, let alone a ‘strong showing.’ Accordingly, this factor weighs against Mr. Trump,” Kaplan wrote in the 17-page opinion, finding no risk of irreparable harm if the case proceeds pending Trump’s latest appeal.
“By contrast, a stay almost certainly would injure both Ms. Carroll and the public interest,” the judge wrote later in the opinion.
Trump's attorneys said they will file yet another appeal for a stay in light of Judge Kaplan's denial.
"While we disagree with the District Court’s decision, we fully anticipated it. We will promptly move before the Second Circuit for a stay to preserve our client’s entitlement to presidential immunity," Trump's personal defense lawyer Alina Habba said in a statement issued Friday afternoon.
The former Elle magazine advice columnist’s lawsuit seeks civil damages for defamation, saying Trump stained her reputation by denying that he sexually assaulted her some 25 years earlier inside a dressing room at the department store Bergdorf Goodman.
Her civil defamation suit arises from then-president Trump’s 2019 denial of her account when she first publicly came forward, detailing the account in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal” and an excerpt published in New York Magazine.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,” Trump said in June 2019, among other repeated denials insisting Carroll was making up the story.
Jurors have already awarded Carroll $5 million in her second civil lawsuit against the former president, following the seven-day battery and defamation trial, where she accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s in the fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman department store.
That case, dubbed “Carroll II,” was filed under a 2022 New York law allowing survivors a one-year window to file time-barred claims.
The second case advanced to trial ahead of Carroll’s first lawsuit due to years of litigation over whether or not Trump can have the Department of Justice step in as a proxy defendant. Last month the department under President Joe Biden formally abandoned its efforts to do so.
Trump's lawyers did not put on any defense case in the “Carroll II” trial in New York federal court. Carroll's team played Trump's deposition video and the infamous Access Hollywood tape as part of their case.
In his latest effort to delay Carroll’s initial suit from moving forward Trump had filed a motion to stay the case pending resolution of his interlocutory appeal of a Judge Kaplan’s denial of Trump’s motion for summary judgment, in which the judge found that Trump had waived his absolute presidential immunity defense by failing to plead or otherwise raise it earlier.
Judge Kaplan was not persuaded by Trump’s argument to halt the case pending another appeal.
“First, by litigating this case for over three years before even raising his presidential immunity defense — and waiting another seven months between first raising his immunity defense and moving to stay this case on that basis — Mr. Trump effectively has forfeited any claim to irreparable harm in the absence of a stay,” he wrote in his order denying the stay. “In other words, any purported harm resulting from his having to stand trial despite a potential claim to immunity would be entirely of his own doing.”
Discovery in this case was completed in November 2022, the judge noted.
The case is scheduled to begin trial on Jan. 15, 2024.
Trump, currently the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, is facing a slew of criminal cases ahead of an election year.
Special counsel Jack Smith proposed a Jan. 2, 2024 start date for a trial in the 2020 election subversion case against Trump in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection riot at the U.S Capitol. Trump’s lawyers have asked to delay that case two years after the election into 2026.
Late Monday evening, Trump was indicted in sprawling RICO case over the pressure he put on Georgia election officials after the 2020 election to find more votes to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.
Additionally he faces a May 2024 trial in Florida federal court on allegations he mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House.
Trump separately faces a state prosecution in New York related to hush money paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign, which is currently set to go to trial in Manhattan Supreme Court on March 25, 2024, while presidential primaries are underway.
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