Judge lets writer’s rape suit proceed against Trump

NEW YORK — A federal judge rejected former President Donald Trump’s effort to dismiss a lawsuit in which writer E. Jean Carroll accuses Trump of raping her in a dressing room at a Fifth Avenue department store in the mid-1990s.

Judge Lewis Kaplan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan upheld a 2022 New York law that gives adults who say they have been sexually assaulted years ago a one-time window to sue those they say abused them even if the period for doing so under the statute of limitations has expired.

In his ruling Friday, Kaplan labeled “absurd” Trump’s argument that the legislation violated the state constitution.

Carroll, an author and a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, sued Trump on Nov. 24, the start of the period in which the law, the Adult Survivors Act, allows such suits to be brought.

Lawyers for Trump, who has denied Carroll’s accusation, sought to dismiss Carroll’s suit on the grounds that allowing suits that were otherwise barred by the statute of limitations was an infringement of a person’s right to due process and therefore in violation of the New York Constitution.

Kaplan ruled the fact that adult victims of sexual abuse “are legally and in some respects practically capable” of filing a suit from the moment the abuse occurs was “constitutionally immaterial.”

“The elected branches of the New York State government have determined that many such victims are unable to do so, sometimes for long periods of time,” Kaplan wrote. “They are prevented by suppression of awful memories or deterred by fear and a ‘culture of silence’ — just as Ms. Carroll claims she was dissuaded from reporting or suing Mr. Trump.”

Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said in a statement that she and her client were “disappointed” with Kaplan’s decision but that they planned “to immediately appeal the order.”

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, said she and Carroll, who has sued Trump separately for defamation, were looking forward to the trial in the sexual assault litigation. That trial is scheduled to begin in April. (Roberta Kaplan and the judge are not related.)

The judge is also presiding in the defamation case. It, like the rape suit, has its origins in Carroll’s assertion, made in a 2019 book and New York magazine excerpt, that Trump assaulted her in a dressing room at the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman.

Trump said that Carroll was “totally lying” and that he had never met her. He also said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.”