Former US President Donald Trump rejected his last chance to testify at a civil trial on Sunday, May 7, where an Elle magazine advice columnist has accused him of raping her in a luxury store department in 1996.
Trump, a Republican candidate for president in 2024, was given until 5 p.m. Sunday by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to file a request to testify. However, nothing was filed.
It’s not the first time Trump is snubbing proceedings in the case which he has denied and called a ‘sham’. Trump has not shown up once during the two-week Manhattan trial where writer E. Jean Carroll testified for several days, repeating claims she first made publicly in a 2019 memoir. She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages totaling millions of dollars.
On the witness stand, Carroll, 79, testified that Trump, 76, raped her in spring 1996 after they met at the entrance of the midtown Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman.
She said the encounter began as a fun and flirtatious outing as Trump coaxed her into helping him shop for a gift for another woman. She said they ended up in the store’s lingerie section where no one was, where they teased each other to try on a see-through bodysuit.
Carrol claims, they both laughed in the dressing room before Trump became violent, slammed her up against a wall, pulled aside her tights and raped her before she kicked him with her knee and fled the store.
In his deposition, Trump said Carroll made the story up. He called it “a false, disgusting lie” delivered by a “nut job” who was trying to stoke sales of her book.
Trump also repeated comments he made in statements that she was not his “type.”
“She’s not my type and that’s 100% true,” he said.
And he repeated his claims in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which he bragged that men who are celebrities can grab women by the genitals without asking.
“Historically that’s true with stars,” he said.
Carroll sued Trump in November, minutes after New York state enacted a law allowing adult sexual assault victims to sue others even if the attacks occurred decades earlier.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote a letter to the judge Sunday to complain that Trump still has not removed April 26 posts on his social media network in which he called Carroll’s allegations “a made up SCAM.” And she noted that he repeated disparaging remarks about the trial three days ago in Ireland.
After the April 26 postings on Truth Social, Judge Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll’s lawyer, said Trump’s comments were “highly inappropriate” and expressed concern that Trump was trying to communicate to the jury “about stuff that has no business being spoken about.”