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United StatesRape charge: Donald Trump will have to testify
E. Jean Carroll accuses Donald Trump of having defamed her by claiming that the account of the rape she says she suffered in the 1990s was false.
Donald Trump on October 9, 2022 in Arizona.
Getty Images via AFP
A New York judge on Wednesday rejected a request by former US President Donald Trump to postpone his testimony, scheduled for next week, in a defamation case once morest a former journalist who accuses him of rape in the 1990s , says a court document.
In this case, E. Jean Carroll, known for having been a columnist in the magazine “Elle”, had sued Donald Trump in civil proceedings in November 2019 in a court in the State of New York.
She accused him of defaming her for calling a “complete lie,” in June 2019, his accusations that he raped her in the fitting room of a New York department store in the mid-1990s. The Republican president, then in office, had claimed that he had never met her and that she was “not his kind of woman”.
The complaint has been delayed by procedural battles, including whether Donald Trump should be represented by the US government in the case as president at the time.
«Adult Survivors Act»
For Judge Lewis Kaplan, the question is not definitively settled, but it cannot delay the case any longer, and the depositions of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, scheduled respectively for Friday and next Wednesday, in particular because of the “advanced age” of the parties, 78 for the complainant, 76 for Donald Trump.
“As this court has already noted, Mr. Trump has attacked these proceedings since they began in 2019, with the effect and probably the objective of delaying them,” said Judge Kaplan.
The magistrate also notes in his decision the intention of the former journalist to claim damages from the former American president for the alleged rape himself, when a new law of the State of New York will come into force allowing bring a civil complaint without taking into account the limitation periods. This law, called the “Adult Survivors Act”, will take effect on November 24.
(AFP)
