A lawyer for a woman who accused former President Donald Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s and then filed a defamation lawsuit against him said Tuesday she will not seek to depose Trump prior to trial because it would cause unnecessary delay, but added that a DNA sample was still being sought, reported The Associated Press.
Attorney Roberta Kaplan first made the revelation in Manhattan federal court during a pretrial hearing before explaining the decision to reporters outside the court as her client, E. Jean Carroll, stood by her side.
A deposition, Kaplan said, would “inevitably result in an inordinate amount of delay.”
“We want the case to go forward,” she said.
Attorney Alina Habba, who represented Trump at the hearing, said outside court that she had not previously heard that Carroll’s lawyers did not want a deposition, a proceeding in which lawyers in civil cases question likely witnesses under oath prior to trial.
“It’s surprising,” Habba said.
As for a DNA sample, Habba said: “None has been demanded.”
Kaplan, though, said the DNA sample had been requested after the case was first filed in state court, and the demand still exists after it was moved to federal court.
She said she would be “more than perfectly happy” to wait to interview Trump at trial, which she estimated could occur in as little as six months, after some near-term legal obstacles are cleared.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people alleging sexual assault, but Carroll has consented to being named in the media.
She told reporters outside court that she was looking forward to the trial on behalf of all women “who have been grabbed and groped, assaulted and raped by men in power and are silenced.”
“And we are looking to bring justice, at least in this one case, against a powerful man,” she said, adding that she would “never settle, never.”
“This is about principle. It’s about a powerful man assaulting and raping a woman and then getting away with it. That’s not right,” she said.
Carroll in a June 2019 book said Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in an upscale Manhattan department store.