A notorious video in which former US president Donald Trump was recorded speaking disparagingly about women can be shown to jurors deciding what he owes a columnist he defamed, a judge has ruled.
US district judge Lewis A Kaplan ruled the 2005 Access Hollywood video can be shown in the trial, which is due to start on Tuesday.
In May, a jury awarded columnist E Jean Carroll five million dollars (£3.9 million) after concluding she was sexually abused by the former president in 1996 and that he defamed her in 2022 with public denials and insistence she was lying.
The video was recorded more than a decade before Mr Trump became president.In it, Mr Trump was heard bragging about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women who were not his wife as he waited to make a cameo appearance on a soap opera in 2005.
The judge has ruled the tape could provide a useful insight into Mr Trump's state of mind.
"The jury could find that Mr Trump was prepared to admit privately to sexual assaults eerily similar to that alleged by Ms Carroll," the judge said.
The tape was seen by a jury that in May concluded that Trump sexually abused Ms Carroll in a luxury department store in 1996 and defamed her in October 2022. It awarded $5 million in damages.
Next week's trial will decide what defamation damages Mr Trump must pay Ms Carroll for similar comments he made to her in 2019.
The jury in May did not find sufficient evidence to conclude Mr Trump raped Ms Carroll, who had testified that the pair had a chance encounter that was flirtatious and humorous until Mr Trump pushed her against a wall and sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman store dressing room across from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan.Mr Trump adamantly disputed Carroll's claim that he raped her in the dressing room when she first revealed it publicly as she released a memoir in 2019, while Mr Trump was president.
He said he didn't know her, she wasn't his type and that she was likely making false claims to promote sales of her book and for political reasons.Ms Carroll, 80, is expected to testify at next week's trial, projected to last about a week, that Trump's remarks subjected her to ridicule and threats and damaged her career and reputation. She is seeking $10 million in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages.Trump, 77, the leading Republican contender in this year's presidential race, is listed as a witness for the trial, but he did not show up at last year's trial and it is unknown whether he will testify.As part of his ruling Tuesday, the judge also ruled Mr Trump's lawyers cannot introduce evidence or argument "suggesting or implying" that former president did not sexually assault Ms Carroll, that she fabricated her account of the assault or that she had financial and political motivations to do so.
Lawyers for Mr Trump have not commented on the ruling.At a speech in Iowa on Saturday, Mr Trump told the crowd he was warned by his lawyer not to attend last year's trial because "it's beneath you."He mocked Ms Carroll at one point during the speech and complained that "now I have to pay her money, a woman who I have no idea who she is."
When the video surfaced during the 2016 US presidential election, Mr Trump dismissed it as "locker room banter" and "a private conversation".
Mr Trump is embroiled in another civil business fraud trial in New York surrounding claims his net worth was inflated by billions of dollars on financial statements that helped him secure business loans and insurance.
The former president plans to deliver his own closing argument in the trial, according to reports in the US.
Mr Trump attended a court hearing in Washington on Tuesday in a different case relating to federal charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, where he suggested presidents should have immunity against prosecution.
"I feel that as a president, you have to have immunity, very simple," Mr Trump said after attending the hearing. "It's the opening of a Pandora's box and it's a very, very sad thing that's happened with this whole situation."
He has long vowed to prosecute President Joe Biden if a second Trump administration returns to the White House and also said former president Barack Obama and George W Bush could be prosecuted.
He said there "will be bedlam in the country" if the case against him continues.
Federal appeal court judges at the hearing expressed scepticism at Mr Trump's argument that he was immune from prosecution.
Judge Karen Le Craft Henderson said: "I think it's paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law."
