Woman who says Trump raped her seeks his DNA
NEW YORK » Lawyers for a woman who accuses President Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s are asking for a DNA sample, seeking to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress she says she wore during the encounter.
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers served notice to a Trump attorney Thursday for Trump to submit a sample on March 2 in Washington for “analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress.”
Carroll filed a defamation suit against Trump in November after the president denied her allegation, saying he didn’t know and had never even met her. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, then had the black wool coat-style dress tested. A lab report with the legal notice says DNA found in skin cells on the outer surface of the sleeves was a mix of at least four people, at least one of them male.
Several other people were tested and eliminated as possible contributors to the mix, according to the lab report, which was obtained by The Associated Press. Their names are redacted, but the report indicates they were involved in a photo shoot where she wore the dress last year, the only time Carroll says she has donned the dress since the alleged assault.
“Unidentified male DNA on the dress could prove that Donald Trump not only knows who I am, but also that he violently assaulted me in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman and then defamed me by lying about it and impugning my character,” Carroll said in a statement Thursday.
The White House and Trump’s lawyer have not responded to a request for comment.
While the notice is a demand, such demands sometimes spur court fights requiring a judge to weigh in on whether they will be enforced.
Carroll accused Trump last summer of raping her in a dressing room in Bergdorf Goodman, a Manhattan luxury department store, in the mid1990s.
She had kept the dress because it was a favorite and she hoped she could someday feel comfortable wearing it again, her legal team says.
Trump said in June that Carroll was “totally lying” and he had “never met this person in my life.” While a 1987 photo shows them and their then-spouses at a social event, Trump dismissed it as a moment when he was “standing with my coat on in a line.”