Judge Denies Trump’s DNA Testing Gambit in Rape Trial
Trump's lawyers made a late offer to check his DNA against a coat dress E. Jean Carroll wore decades ago when she claims she was raped. The judge saw through it.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
A New York federal judge has swiftly rejected former President Donald Trump’s last minute offer to finally check his DNA against the coat dress worn by E. Jean Carroll, the woman who says he raped her in a department store decades ago.
“Mr. Trump has offered no persuasive reason to relieve [him] of the consequences of [his] own failure to [act] in a timely fashion,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled Wednesday morning. “He has failed to demonstrate good cause to reopen discovery for the purpose of obtaining these pages of the DNA report.”
Trump faces a Bill Cosby type trial in April alleging that he raped Carroll inside a dressing room at the high-end Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s.
Last week, The Daily Beast revealed that Trump had quietly agreed with his lawyers to dangle a poisonous offer to the other side. After refusing to play ball for three years, the former president was finally willing to submit a DNA sample—but only after the window to share evidence had closed, a ploy that threatened to delay the trial.
Days later, Trump’s lawyers formally made the offer in court papers. But, as with all things Trump, it came with a catch. His lawyers said he was willing to check his DNA, but only if they could access a part of the report Carroll commissioned from the California lab that tested the black dress.
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On Wednesday, the judge said he wouldn't play along—and he blamed Trump’s lawyers for the unforced error.
“Mr. Trump suddenly proposed a deal. He has offered to provide a DNA sample but only on the condition that I require Ms. Carroll first to turn over to him a previously undisclosed appendix to the DNA report—the report that Ms. Carroll obtained and provided to Mr. Trump years ago,” he wrote. “There is no justification for any such deal.”
“Mr. Trump is not entitled to the undisclosed appendix. The time for pretrial discovery in both cases is over, and Mr. Trump never previously asked for it,” he added.
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