by NEW YORK (AP) – Former President Donald Trump is willing to provide a DNA sample to compare with the stains on the dress of a woman who accused him of rape, even if only under certain conditions, his lawyer said Friday .
Attorney Joseph Tacopina told a federal court judge in Manhattan in a letter that Trump will turn over the sample provided the lawyers for his accuser, columnist E. Jean Carroll, first provide the missing pages from a DNA report on the dress.
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan called that offer a bogus effort to delay an April trial and prejudice potential jurors.
He filed a letter with the judge saying the sudden offer of DNA after Trump refused to provide it for three years was a “legally frivolous delay tactic.”
“The time has come for him to face a jury,” Kaplan wrote, noting that the period in which new facts could be unearthed for the trial expired in October.
According to a court filing on Thursday, Trump and Carroll are both listed as their lawyers’ first possible witnesses in a trial scheduled to begin on April 24.
Carroll, 79, is suing Trump for defamation and rape, saying Trump turned a friendly meeting in a luxury Manhattan department store in late 1995 or early 1996 into a violent rape.
She didn’t speak about it publicly until she released a book in 2019: “What Do We Need Men For?”
Trump insisted the meeting never happened, even during an October deposition, and his attorney said the same in his latest court filing.
Tacopina said Carroll and her lawyers were trying to get a publicity advantage by claiming Trump’s DNA was on the dress she was wearing the night she said she was raped.
“Mr. Trump’s DNA is either on the suit or it’s not,” she said.
Tacopina said Carroll’s attorneys refused to produce a dozen pages of the DNA report they obtained because “she knows her DNA isn’t on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never happened.”
Kaplan, however, said Carroll decided to proceed with the trial without a protracted battle over DNA evidence after Trump’s repeated refusals to provide a sample.
“There is no DNA evidence in this case and none will be presented at trial,” Kaplan wrote.
Instead, her client “accumulated powerful evidence that Trump sexually assaulted her” without the sample, Kaplan said.
The lawyer said an expert report showed the presence of unidentified male DNA on the suit Carroll was wearing when he met Trump, but he said it was not an isolated sample of male DNA, but rather a mix of DNA which would require a complex analysis if the judge allowed the matter to be reopened before trial.
