(Bloomberg) — A New York judge brushed off Donald Trump’s concern that the media frenzy over his recent criminal indictment over business records will make it too difficult to find fair jurors for his separate civil sexual-assault trial set to start next week.
(Bloomberg) — A New York judge brushed off Donald Trump’s concern that the media frenzy over his recent criminal indictment over business records will make it too difficult to find fair jurors for his separate civil sexual-assault trial set to start next week.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday denied Trump’s request to delay by four weeks the trial of claims brought by New York author E. Jean Carroll, who alleges the former president raped her in a dressing room the 1990s. The trial will start as planned on April 25 in Manhattan, the judge ruled.
Trump had argued a “cooling off” period was needed for the Carroll case after the former president was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to a porn star to influence the 2016 election.
But Kaplan didn’t buy it. The two cases are “entirely unrelated,” the judge said.
“The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment — coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump’s own actions — would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation,” Kaplan wrote.
Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina declined to comment. Trump has denied assaulting Carroll and claims her lawsuit — as well as Bragg’s criminal case — are part of a broader “witch hunt” against him.
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The former president had argued that because sexual misconduct was at the “heart” of both cases, potential jurors in the Carroll trial may be affected by the coverage of Bragg’s indictment. But Kaplan ruled that alleged rape was at the center of one case, while alleged falsification of business records was at the heart of the other.
“To be sure, at a certain level of generality, both cases do indeed have something to do with ‘sex,’” Kaplan said. “But the ‘something’ that each has to do with it is dramatically different.”
Also on Monday, Tacopina asked the judge to allow him to be involved in every step of the jury selection process, notwithstanding Kaplan’s earlier decision to use an anonymous jury and prevent the legal teams or their clients from knowing the identities of the potential jurors. The lawyer said it wasn’t clear if the attorneys would be permitted to ask questions of prospective jurors, and argued his involvement is needed due to the potential for political bias.
“Given the parties involved in this case, the attendant publicity surrounding it, the sensitivity of the issues involved, as well as the possibility of political bias, we believe that a robust jury selection process — one in which counsel is involved at each step — is necessary in the interests of justice,” Tacopina said.
Carroll, a former advice columnist with Elle magazine, went public in 2019 with her claim that Trump raped her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan more than two decades ago. The suit going to trial was filed last year under a new New York law that temporarily lifts the statute of limitations for sexual assault claims even if they’re decades old.
The case is Carroll v. Trump, 22-cv-10016, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
(Updates with filing by Trump attorney.)
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