Report: Trump Deposed in Defamation Case Filed by Rape Accuser E. Jean Carroll

The former magazine columnist claimed that former US President Donald Trump raped her in the 1990s. The deposition comes months after Trump refused to answer questions under oath in a deposition in connection with a civil investigation of his company, the Trump Organization, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights over 440 times in that deposition.

Former US President Donald Trump was deposed on Wednesday for a civil lawsuit accusing him of defaming E. Jean Carroll in response to her accusing the one-term commander-in-chief of rape, it has been reported.

Carroll, who is now 78 years old, accused Trump of raping her in a dressing room in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s after the pair met in the store. The accusation first appeared in a 2019 New York magazine article, when Trump was still president.

At the time, Trump defended himself, saying Carroll “wasn’t even [his] type,” and accused her of being motivated by political and monetary reasons to make up the story. Carroll responded by suing Trump in New York State Court for defamation.

Trump had tried to delay the deposition with a pending appeal, but a federal judge knocked him down, and at the same time rejected Trump’s claim to substitute in the federal government in the lawsuit – which would have immediately invoked the doctrine of sovereign immunity, a law that protects the government from being sued without consent. In other words, the government cannot be sued for defamation.

In 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr attempted to replace Trump as the defendant in the case, arguing that because Trump was president when he allegedly defamed Carroll, the government had the power to step in and act as the defendant because he was a government employee. However, Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected the claim, ruling that “the president of the United States is not an employee of the Government within the meaning of the relevant statutes.”

Even if Trump had been considered a government employee, the judge continued, the former president's allegedly defamatory statements would not have been within the scope of his employment.

The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision about Trump not acting as a government employee at the time he responded to Carroll’s article, but the appeals court also asked a Washington, DC, court to decide if Trump made the statements about Carroll within the scope of his employment as president, as defined by DC law.

Carroll has said she also intends to take advantage of a new law in New York that will allow sexual assault victims to sue without a statute of limitations in a one-year window, which will allow her to sue Trump in November for the alleged rape itself. According to Carroll’s lawyer, the former columnist plans to file the lawsuit on Nov. 24, the day the one-year window opens.

"We look forward to establishing on the record that this case is, and always has been, entirely without merit,” said Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys.

Carroll sat for her deposition in the case last week.