Aug. 19 (UPI) — The federal judge in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump has dismissed the latest effort by Trump’s attorneys to delay a trial scheduled for January.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York called the most recent of four attempts by Trump’s lawyers to stay the trial a “frivolous” request which he brushed aside in a sternly written opinion issued Friday.
Trump’s legal team had requested a delay as they appeal a ruling Kaplan issued in December denying their call for a summary judgment to dismiss the case based on the premise that the president’s 2019 remarks about Carroll were covered by “absolute presidential immunity.”
Carroll filed the defamation suit that year after Trump reacted to her accusation that he raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s by denying the accusation, stating that he did not know and never had met Carroll and claiming that she fabricated the accusation for ulterior purposes.
“Trump knew that these statements were false; at bare minimum he acted with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity,” her complaint states.
Carroll won $5 million in damages earlier this year when a New York civil case jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation in connection with the incident itself in a separate case.
Kaplan on Friday rejected the latest attempt by Trump’s attorneys to delay the defamation trial by ruling their appeal seeking presidential immunity is unlikely to win — the Justice Department in July decided not to defend Trump in the case even though his remarks were made to the media while acting in his capacity as president.
‘Mr. Trump’s latest motion to stay — his fourth such request — is yet another such attempt to delay unduly the resolution of this matter,” Kaplan wrote, adding that Trump’s team “has not provided a single reason for the Court to find that there is any likelihood that he will succeed on appeal, let alone a ‘strong showing.'”
