Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the sexual assault lawsuit is denied

A federal judge has denied former US President Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss a sexual assault lawsuit against him.

Trump had requested that writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against him be dismissed. The counselor claims he sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room more than two decades ago.

Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a 28-page opinion on Friday that Trump’s legal arguments were “baseless.”

Carroll sued Trump after New York enacted the Adult Survivors Act (ASA) in 2022, which allowed adult survivors of sexual violence to file lawsuits over attacks that occurred decades earlier. Trump argued that the new law violated due process.

But Kaplan ruled that the state legislature “created the problem created by what he characterized as a ‘culture of silence’ and the existence of comparatively short statutes of limitations for filing civil and criminal charges for sexual assault and other sex crimes recognized long ago”.

“Therefore, the creation of a resuscitation period for otherwise statute-barred adult sexual assault claims targeted what New York reasonably and legitimately viewed as an injustice,” Kaplan wrote.

“To claim that the ASA violates the State Due Process Clause because the legislature allegedly failed to describe that injustice to the defendant’s full satisfaction in a particular paragraph of a particular legislative document — itself a dubious premise — is preposterous.”

Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, said, “While we are disappointed with the court’s decision, we intend to immediately appeal the order and continue to defend our client’s constitutionally protected rights.”

In 2019, in an excerpt from her book published in New York Magazine, Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Carroll accused Trump of asking her to help him choose a gift for another woman, then closing a dressing room door, pinning her against a wall, and raping her for minutes.

Trump publicly stated that her allegations were a “hoax” and a “lie.”

The ex-president has also tried to dismiss a separate defamation lawsuit that Carroll had filed against him. Trump argued that her defamation lawsuit was legally insufficient.

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