Former President Donald Trump missed his chance to use his DNA to try to prove he didn’t rape a longtime magazine advice columnist, a federal judge said Wednesday, clearing away a potential roadblock to an April trial.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected the 11th-hour offer by Trump’s legal team to provide a DNA sample to rebut claims E. Jean Carroll first made publicly in a 2019 book.
Kaplan said that lawyers for Trump and Carroll had over three years to make DNA an issue in the case and that both chose not to do so.
He said it would almost surely delay the trial scheduled to start April 25 to reopen the DNA issue four months after the deadline passed to litigate concerns over trial evidence and just weeks before trial.
Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, declined comment on the ruling. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, also declined to comment.
Carroll’s lawyers have sought Trump’s DNA sample for three years to compare it with stains found on the dress Carroll wore the day she says Trump raped her in an upscale Manhattan department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. An analysis of DNA on the dress concluded it did contain traces of an unknown man’s DNA.
Trump has denied knowing Carroll and said repeatedly, and sometimes angrily, that he never raped Carroll and that she was making the claim to stoke sales of her book.
AP
