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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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The civil trial of columnist E. Jean Carroll against former President Donald Trump has just begun and Trump is already testing the boundaries laid out by the judge presiding over the case.
Speaking to Trump's lawyer on the first day of the civil defamation and battery trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan warned that the former president "may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability" with a recent social media post.
Earlier in the day, Trump made a post on Truth Social calling the accusation a "SCAM" and accusing Carroll's lawyer of being a "political operative." Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan during the mid-1990s—a claim Trump has denied as a "total false accusation."
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Carroll is also suing Trump for defamation over comments he made after she went public with her allegations in 2019.
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On Wednesday, Kaplan called Trump's post "entirely inappropriate" and suggested that the former president was trying to influence the jury, a move that would go against the judge's orders asking the involved parties to "refrain from making any statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest."
"Your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his 'public,' but more troublesome, to the jury in this case," Kaplan told Trump's attorney Joe Tacopina, who said he had not seen or been aware of the posts at the time that it was raised to the court's attention.
In his Truth Social post, Trump referenced the dress that Carroll wore during the alleged encounter, saying it "should be allowed to be part of the case."
Tacopina said in a February 10 letter that Trump would be willing to provide a DNA sample to be used for comparison to the genetic material found on the dress in exchange for the DNA report that Carroll had commissioned.
"Plaintiff would suffer no unfair prejudice or harm by the production of the full DNA Report. Mr. Trump's DNA is either on the dress or it is not. Why is the Plaintiff now hiding from this reality?" Tacopina wrote to Kaplan in a pre-trial letter. "We surmise that the answer to that question is that she knows his DNA is not on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never occurred."
Carroll's legal team argued that the offer to provide DNA was a stalling tactic to delay court proceedings, calling it "a transparent effort to manufacture a dispute over a document Trump has known about for more than three years."
Kaplan sided with Carroll's attorneys on the matter, rejecting Trump's attempt to offer a DNA sample.
On Wednesday, when the dress came up again, the judge pointed out that Trump refused to give a sample for two years, raising questions about why he'd want it in the case now.
"What you're trying to do is to get away from a statement by your client, a public statement, that on the face of it seems entirely inappropriate," Kaplan told Tacopina.
In response, Trump's lawyer said he would speak to his client and ask him not to post about the case.
Because Carroll never contacted the police at the time of the alleged rape, the criminal statute of limitations had long expired when she went public with the accusations in 2019, which is why this case is a civil matter.
She has been able to bring a lawsuit because of New York's recently-passed Adult Survivors Act that opened up a one-year window between November 2022 and November 2023 for people to sue alleged assailants even after the statute of limitations had expired. Carroll filed within minutes of the law taking effect last year.
The trial is expected to last five days.
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