Donald Trump rape accuser can use Access Hollywood tape in trial, judge says
- Writer E. Jean Carroll wants to introduce footage in which the ex-president makes vulgar boasts about grabbing women between the legs
- The tape was released in October 2016 and threatened to upend Trump’s White House run, though he went on to defeat Hillary Clinton
A US judge on Friday rejected Donald Trump’s effort to exclude an Access Hollywood tape of him making vulgar comments about women from a defamation lawsuit by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who says the former president raped her in the mid-1990s.
Carroll sought to introduce an excerpt from the tape, which was recorded in 2005 and where Trump boasted about forcing himself on women, as evidence that Trump had a propensity for sexual assaults comparable to hers.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said that while propensity evidence is ordinarily not admissible, a reasonable jury could find that Trump admitted in the tape “that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so”.
Trump has denied raping Carroll. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Carroll’s lawyers, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
The 23-page decision came in the first of Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits over her alleged encounter with Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Carroll sued Trump in 2019 after he told a reporter at the White House that he did not know Carroll, that she was not his type, and that she made up the rape claim to sell her memoir. She sued again in 2022 after Trump repeated his denials online.