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(Trends Wide) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have asked a judge to delay the start of a sexual assault and defamation trial by a month to allow a “cooling off” period following Trump’s landmark indictment of falsifying business records.
Joe Tacopina, Trump’s lawyer, asked the judge overseeing the assault and defamation lawsuit filed by former columnist E. Jean Carroll to delay the trial until the end of May. The start of the trial is scheduled for April 25.
Tacopina said the group of prospective jurors will have criminal charges “in mind” when called due to intense media coverage and could be influenced by that. Trump was charged with falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels to prevent her from going public with an affair days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
E. Jean Carroll outside the state Supreme Court on March 4, 2020 in New York. Caroll sued Donald Trump for defamation. Credit: Alec Tabak/New York Daily News/Getty Images
“To be sure, President Trump is a persistent topic of media coverage. But the current situation is unique because, as noted, recent coverage concerns alleged sexual misconduct, the very issue that is at the center of this litigation,” Tacopina said in his letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan.
Carroll opposes the request for a continuance, according to a letter from his attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who called the request “unfounded” and said “there are many reasons to believe that the Court can constitute an impartial jury in this case” given the size and diversity of the population of New York City and its surrounding counties.
“Waiting four more weeks will do nothing to ‘cool’ the inevitable press and security concerns that will accompany this trial, concerns that His Honor has taken substantial steps to address,” the letter said. “And in any case, Trump is uniquely inappropriate to complain about impartiality when he has instigated (and tried to profit from) much of the very coverage that he now complains about.”
Kaplan’s letter continued: “The fact that Trump is the subject of an unusually large number of criminal investigations cannot mean that Carroll is barred from pursuing his unrelated civil action, which involves entirely different facts and claims.”
Trump has denied the affair with Daniels. He has also denied sexually assaulting Carroll, who claims Trump raped her in the dressing room of a New York department store in the mid-1990s.
She filed her first defamation lawsuit against Trump in 2019 after he denied the rape, saying “she’s not my type” and claiming she made the claim to boost sales of her book.
— Trends Wide’s Laura Ly and Jack Forrest contributed to this report.
