Donald Trump Attorney Requests Delay in Rape Civil Trial. Can He Get a Fair Trial and Jury Pool?: A lead attorney for former President Donald Trump requested a four-week delay in the upcoming civil trial involving a defamation claim by writer E. Jean Carroll. She accused the former president of raping her back in the 1990s in 2019 while Trump was president.
Carroll claims Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store.
The trial is set to start on April 25. Trump’s legal team wants that pushed back to at least May 23.
What We Know
Carroll filed a suit against Donald Trump after he tweeted a denial of her claim against him from a prior defamation suit put on indefinite hold.
That trial was supposed to have dealt with Trump’s claim to a reporter while he was in office in 2019 that Carroll’s allegation against him was part of a Democratic Party conspiracy against him.
“E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance,” Donald Trump wrote in an Oct. 22, 2022 post on Truth Social. “Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to ‘Trump’!”
The Jury Issue
Donald Trump attorney Joseph Tacopina wrote Federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan asking for a “cooling off” period between the former president’s recent indictment on business fraud charges and the civil proceeding. Tacopina cited the “recent deluge of prejudicial media coverage” in Manhattan for his request.
“Holding the trial of this case three weeks after these historic events will guarantee that many, if not most, prospective jurors will have the criminal allegations top of mind when judging President Trump’s defense against Carroll’s allegations,” Tacopina wrote. “Widely covered criminal charges against a civil litigant should raise urgent concerns over contamination of potential jurors.
Tacopina continued: “That is true of criminal charges of any kind, but the threat to President Trump’s rights is particularly dire because coverage of the indictment has repeated salacious and false accusations ―exactly what Ms. Carroll alleges in this case.”
He worries coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual conduct with Stormy Daniels will prejudice the jury pool and make jurors more inclined not to give him the benefit of the doubt. The lawyer wants the “frenzy” over the coverage of the indictment to recede before moving ahead with the civil trial.
“The indictment drove a more than four-fold coverage of this case, which reflects a predictable and troubling tendency to view the allegations against President Trump as relevant to Ms. Carroll’s allegations in this civil action,” Tacopina wrote.
Kaplan recently ruled that the jurors would be anonymous in this case due to what he saw as incitement.
“Mr. Trump’s quite recent reaction to what he perceived as an imminent threat of indictment by a grand jury sitting virtually next door to this Court was to encourage ‘protest’ and to urge people to ‘take our country back,’” Kaplan wrote. “That reaction reportedly has been perceived by some as incitement to violence. And it bears mention that Mr. Trump repeatedly has attacked courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters.”
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