US District Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York has denied a request from Trump's legal team to halt proceedings in E. Jean Carroll's ongoing defamation lawsuit against the former US president.
Kaplan's order - entered on Wednesday - denied the request without prejudice, dashing Trump's attempt to receive a "stay" on the federal judge's December 2020 ruling.
At the time, Kaplan rejected the then-US president's attempt to substitute the US Department of Justice as the defendant in the lawsuit. The federal judge argued that Trump must remain the defendant, as he was not acting in his official capacity when he rebutted Carroll's allegations.
"His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States," Kaplan wrote in a December 2020 statement.
The DoJ, of both the Trump and Biden administrations, has asserted that 45 was acting within the scope of his employment when he responded to press questions about Carroll's accusations in June 2019.
However, Kaplan declared in his December ruling that even if Trump was in office at the time of the alleged incident, his statements toward Carroll would be outside the scope of his employment.
E. Jean Carroll is photographed, Sunday, June 23, 2019, in New York. Carroll, a New York-based advice columnist, claims Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Trump denies knowing Carroll. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
© AP Photo / Craig Ruttle
The Wednesday order allows the defamation suit to resume normal proceedings, following several months of delays by Trump and the federal government. At the same time, Trump's legal team is permitted to request another stay, due to the judge's order being issued "without prejudice."
"We’re looking forward to oral argument in our case before the Second Circuit during the week of November 29," Roberta Kaplan, Carroll's attorney, said in a Wednesday statement to The Hill.
"In the meantime, we are reviewing Judge Kaplan’s order," she added.
Carroll, a longtime columnist for lifestyle magazine Elle, made mainstream US headlines after she alleged that Trump threw her against the wall of a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in either 1995 or early 1996.
"The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I'm not certain — inside me," Carroll wrote in a book excerpt published by New York Magazine in June 2019.
After a "colossal struggle," the columnist was able to escape from the famed real estate mogul, according to her account.