Judge: Trump accuser can press defamation suit

NEW YORK — A New York judge knocked down President Donald Trump’s bid to delay a lawsuit from a woman who accused him of rape, ruling in a decision released Thursday that the presidency doesn’t shield him from the case.

Pointing to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the president isn’t immune from a New York prosecutor’s criminal investigation, Manhattan judge Verna Saunders said the same principle applies to E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit, in which Trump’s lawyers have argued that the Constitution bars presidents from being dragged into lawsuits in state courts. “No, it does not,” Saunders wrote. The decision allows Carroll — who is seeking Trump’s DNA as potential evidence — to keep pursuing her lawsuit. She says he slurred her in denying her allegation that he raped her in the 1990s.

“We are now eager to move forward with discovery so that we can prove that Donald Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll when he lied about her in connection with her brave decision to tell the truth about the fact that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her,” said her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan.

Carroll, who was a longtime Elle magazine advice columnist until December, went public last year with an allegation that Trump raped her in a Manhattan luxury department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

Trump said that Carroll was “totally lying” to sell a memoir and that he had never met her, though a 1987 photo showed them and their then-spouses at a social event. He said it just captured a moment when he was standing in a line.