MANHATTAN (CN) – With a nod to the endless stream of tweets emanating from the White House, a New York judge refused Friday to nix a defamation lawsuit from an advice columnist who says President Donald Trump raped her.
"There is not even a tweet, much less an affidavit by defendant Trump in support," Justice Doris Ling-Cohan of the Manhattan Supreme Court wrote in a 2-page decision published this morning today.
“Not only was no affidavit from defendant Trump supplied in support of this application, but even the defendant’s attorney’s affirmation does not assert a basis (evidentiary or otherwise) for dismissal; rather the affirmation acts as a mere conduit to provide documents relating to the procedural posture of the case,” the judge added.
Trump attorney Lawrence Rosen had argued in the motion to dismiss that because the Trump’s statements about E. Jean Carroll were not made in New York and because he left his longtime Empire State residence for Washington, D.C., the New York court lacks jurisdiction to try the case.
Carroll, a 75-year-old advice columnist for Elle Magazine, accused Trump last summer of raping her in a dressing room of the luxury department store dressing room Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
The high-end department store was located one block North of Trump’s namesake skyscraper, Trump Tower.
In a New York magazine piece and a subsequent book, Carroll said the two ran into each other, bantered and went to the lingerie department for Trump to pick out a gift for an unidentified woman.
After ripping down her tights and pinning her arms, Carroll alleged that Trump unzipped his pants and forced his penis inside her.
Trump said in June 2019 that Carroll was "totally lying," calling her accusation "fake news." He insisted that they had never met, though a 1987 photo shows them and their then-spouses at an NBC party. Trump dismissed the photograph, remarking he was just "standing with my coat on in a line."
Later in an interview with The Hill, Trump said “she’s not my type.”
In an ensuing defamation suit, Carroll said Trump’s remarks smeared her and harmed her career.
Represented by Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, Carroll says that letters for her column are down 50% as compared with the same quarter last year.
The defamation suit seeks unspecified damages and a retraction of Trump's statements.
While she refused to dismiss the suit, Ling-Cohan also found that there was no basis to stay the discovery deadlines in the case.
“We are pleased, yet unsurprised, that the court refused to tolerate Donald Trump’s latest attempt to avoid discovery in our client’s case,” attorney Kaplan said in a statement Friday. “We look forward to moving ahead and proving that Donald Trump lied when he told the world that he did not rape our client and had not even met her.”
Rosen, a partner at Manhattan-firm LaRocca Hornik Rosen Greenberg & Blaha, has previously represented the Trump Organization and other Trump-related business entities.
Rosen did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday afternoon.
Follow @jruss_jruss
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
