The lawyers of E Jean Carroll, who has claimed Donald Trump raped her, are fighting the former president’s efforts to toss out her lawsuit by reminding the judge of the legal precedent he set in a similar lawsuit.
Ms Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, made the rape claim for the first time publicly in a 2019 book and said the former president had raped her in a department store in New York.
While serving as president, Mr Trump said the sexual assault never happened and said that “she’s not my type”.
Ms Carroll asserted that a friendly chance encounter between her and Mr Trump at the upscale Manhattan department store turned violent when he cornered her in a dressing room and raped her.
She sued him on 24 November last year under New York’s Adult Survivors Act for battery, on the day law took effect.
Mr Trump’s attorneys are trying to fend off Ms Carroll’s lawsuit on the grounds that a temporary New York state law letting adult sex abuse victims sue decades later is invalid.
Ms Carroll’s lawyers, however, have demanded judge Lewis A Kaplan should reject this request and cited the precedent that the judge established in the lawsuit filed by Virginia Guiffre in the Jeffrey Epstein case, alleging Prince Andrew sexually abused her.
Demanding dismissal of the case, Mr Trump said that as “well-intentioned as it may be, is a fundamentally flawed law that is unable to withstand constitutional scrutiny”.
His lawyers said the law violates the New York State Constitution, was an invasion of due process and a “clear abuse of legislative power”.
They also wrote that the state, in enacting the Adult Survivors Act, had provided no reason “why Plaintiff’s own neglect or refusal to bring an action within the applicable time period should be construed as an injustice against her”. The statute of limitations, they said, expired after five years.
Ms Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, however, reminded the judge of a similar argument that Prince Andrew’s lawyers made against the constitutionality of the law that allowed child sex abuse survivors to make claims years after the statute of limitations would have prevented them.
“Conceding that the claim has recently been revived by New York’s Adult Survivors Act (ASA), Trump insists that the ASA violates the Due Process Clause of the New York State Constitution,” stated Ms Carroll’s legal brief on Wednesday.
“He is mistaken: the ASA is a reasonable measure passed by the New York legislature to remedy an identifiable injustice. Trump’s assertion that the ASA is unconstitutional because adult victims of sexual assault have only themselves to blame for not coming forward sooner is offensive and wrong,” Ms Kaplan said, according to Law and Crime, as she cited Prince Andrew’s case.
At the time, Judge Kaplan said the argument that the temporary law was improper, had “for good reason“ been rejected by every New York state and federal court to have considered it.
He wrote that the “claim-revival window was a reasonable measure to address an injustice”.
Weeks later, Prince Andrew settled the lawsuit, agreeing to donate to the charity of the woman who claimed he had sexually abused her when she was 17 and to declare he never meant to malign her character.
