Trump says he'll provide DNA sample in defamation case

Donald Trump has agreed to provide a DNA sample in the sex assault case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, his lawyers said Friday.

Carroll, who says Trump raped her inside a luxury Manhattan department store in the mid-nineties, requested Trump's DNA in January 2020, shortly after she first sued him in state Supreme Court for smearing her name by calling her a liar.

She said she never washed the black Donna Karan coat dress she wore during the alleged assault, which testing showed contained an unidentified man's genetic material, according to court records. Trump's lawyers outright rejected the request and described it as intrusive.

But on Friday, Trump's new lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said the former president is now willing to submit a DNA sample. He asked for access to Carroll's data records detailing what was recovered from the dress, which were not previously submitted on the record.

“Mr. Trump is indeed willing to provide a DNA sample for the sole purpose of comparing it to the DNA found on the dress at issue, so long as the missing pages of the DNA Report are promptly produced prior to our client producing his DNA,” Tacopina wrote, adding it was not a delay tactic.

“Mr. Trump's DNA is either on the dress or it is not. Why is Plaintiff now hiding from this reality? We surmise that the answer to that question is that she knows his DNA is not on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never occurred.”

In response, Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan described Trump's 11th-hour about-face as an effort to delay the trial and “a badfaith effort to taint the potential jury pool.”

“Trump's letter should be seen for exactly what it is: a transparent effort to manufacture a dispute over a document Trump has known about for more than three years, in order to delay these proceedings, put off the first day of trial at all costs, prejudice potential jurors, and `take back' his own past strategic decisions in this litigation,” Kaplan wrote.

“Trump may prefer to put off trial for another day, and he [and his new lawyers] may regret decisions that he made earlier in the case, but that is no basis to again delay Carroll's day in court.”

Trump's offer came three days after a judge set an April 25 trial date and months after the evidence stage in the case ended.