NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump was questioned under oath Wednesday by lawyers for New York author E. Jean Carroll, who alleges he raped her in a department store dressing room two decades ago and defamed her when he denied it while he was in office.
Trump, 76, had no choice but to go ahead with the deposition after a New York judge last week rejected the former president’s latest effort to put the questioning on hold.
“We’re pleased that on behalf of our client, E. Jean Carroll, we were able to take Donald Trump’s deposition today,” the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink said in an emailed statement. “We are not able to comment further.”
Trump has denied attacking Carroll or defaming her, alleging she made the claim to promote her book.
The court-ordered testimony illustrates the breadth of Trump’s legal woes, which also include a criminal investigation into his handling of White House records, attempts to pressure Georgia officials to find votes for him and a probe of his actions around the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A judge has also ordered Trump to be questioned under oath by Oct. 31 in a civil fraud suit by investors in a troubled multi-level marketing company, which Trump was secretly paid millions of dollars to promote for years on his reality-TV show.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long Trump was questioned by Carroll’s lawyers or whether he asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination, as he did in a recent deposition by New York Attorney General Letitia James as part of a civil probe into his company’s asset valuations. James went on to file a $250 million fraud suit against Trump.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Wednesday’s deposition. She has previously said that Trump was “ready and eager” to testify.
While Carroll sued Trump for defamation, court filings have indicated that much of the questioning would focus on her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a deserted Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan. Carroll went public with the claim in a 2019 magazine article, prompting a furious response from Trump and the White House.
Other depositions in the case have already taken place in recent weeks, including that of former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was on the job when Trump issued allegedly defamatory denials of Carroll’s claims. A writer who claims Trump sexually assaulted her during an interview and a former saleswoman who says he groped her on an airplane were also deposed as part of Carroll’s effort to show there is a well-established pattern of Trump assaulting women.
Trump had asked to delay the case after he won part of his appeal over whether Carroll’s suit is barred by a federal statute that broadly protects government workers from lawsuits related to their official job duties.
In a Sept. 27 ruling, the federal appeals court in New York agreed with Trump that presidents qualify as government employees but asked the highest local court in Washington, the DC Court of Appeals, to decide the separate issue of whether his allegedly defamatory remarks fell within his official duties.
The case is Carroll v. Trump, 20-cv-07311, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
