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Former President Donald Trump angrily lashed out on Wednesday, calling the nation’s legal system a broken disgrace” after a judge ruled he must answer questions under oath next week in a defamation lawsuit lodged by a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s.
He also called the 2019 lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, a hoax and a lie”.
The outburst late in the day came hours after US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan rejected a request by his lawyers to delay a deposition scheduled for October 19.
Kaplan is presiding over the case in which Carroll said Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s. He called the lawsuit a complete con job”.
I don’t know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at a celebrity charity event,” Trump said.
She completely made up a story that I met her at the doors of this crowded New York City Department Store and, within minutes, swooned’ her. It is a Hoax and a lie, just like all the other Hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” he said.
Then he grumbled: 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’!”
Carroll is scheduled to be deposed on Friday.
Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said she was pleased with the judge’s ruling and looked forward to filing new claims next month and moving forward to trial with all dispatch after New York state passed the Adult Survivors Act, allowing her to sue for damages for the alleged rape without the statute of limitations blocking it.
