Donald Trump to be sued by rape accuser under New York State's new sexual assault survivor's law: report

20 September 2022

Former President Donald Trump will soon face yet another lawsuit in the the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York.

According to Reuters, E. Jean Carroll – an ex-Elle journalist who has accused Trump of raping her in a Mahattan department store in the 1990s – "plans to sue Trump for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress under New York State's Adult Survivors Act."

The law, Reuters explained, was "recently signed by Governor Kathy Hochul" and "gives adult accusers a one-year window to bring civil claims over alleged sexual misconduct regardless of how long ago it occurred."

Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in a letter to District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan that was made public on Tuesday that "as soon as that statute authorizes us to do so on November 24, 2022, we will file the case in this District and, as required by the Local Rules, mark it as related to the present action." Trump, they stressed, "has barely participated in the discovery process at all" and “remains unwilling to produce any documents in discovery."

Carroll's filing is in addition to a separate defamation case against her alleged attacker.

Trump's lawyer Alina Habba, meanwhile, argued in an August 11th response that Trump "'adamantly' objected to combining both cases which would occur after both sides finished gathering evidence for trial, and that it was 'extraordinarily prejudicial' to add the new claims," Reuters reported. "To permit plaintiff to drastically alter the scope and subject matter of this case at such time would severely prejudice defendant's rights. Plaintiff's request must be disregarded in its entirety."

Habba is also part Trump's defense team in the Department of Justice's ongoing investigation into the trove of classified documents that the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized durings its search warrant execution at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida last month. Ironically, the DOJ had been defending Trump while he was still in office under then-Attorney General Bill Barr.