NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers for a former advice columnist who claims Donald Trump raped her in a department store locker room in the 1990s are fighting his attempts to dismiss the lawsuit, reminding the judge of his own decision in a similar lawsuit against Prince. Andrew.
Lawyers for the former president are trying to dismiss E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit on the grounds that a temporary New York state law allowing adult victims of sexual assault to file decades later is invalid. In a filing in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, Carroll’s lawyers wrote that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan should deny Trump’s request.
When the law went into effect in November, Carroll’s lawyers immediately sued. They filed a rape lawsuit following an earlier lawsuit Carroll filed against Trump alleging a defamation charge. As president, Trump said that sexual assault never happened and that “she’s not my type.” Carroll, a longtime columnist for Elle magazine, first spoke publicly about the rape in a 2019 book.
In both lawsuits, Carroll alleged that a chance friendly encounter between her and Trump at an upmarket Manhattan department store turned violent when Trump cornered her in a locker room in 1995 or 1996 and raped her.
Kaplan dismissed a legal argument similar to that put forward by Trump’s lawyers last January, when Prince Andrew’s lawyers opposed the constitutionality of a temporary state law allowing victims of child sexual abuse to file claims years after a statute of limitations would otherwise have prevented claims. .
At the time, Kaplan said that the argument that the interim law was improper “for good reason” was dismissed by every New York state and federal court that heard it.
Kaplan wrote that “the recovery window was a reasonable measure to remedy an injustice.”
A few weeks later, Prince Andrew settled the lawsuit by agreeing to make a donation to the charity of a woman who claimed he raped her when she was 17 and to state that he never wanted to denigrate her character.
Two weeks ago, in seeking to have Carroll’s lawsuit dismissed, Trump’s attorneys wrote that the state’s Adult Victims Act, “however well-intentioned, is a fundamentally flawed law that does not stand up to constitutional scrutiny.”
They said the law differed from its predecessor, the Child Victims Act, because it was not highly specialized and “arbitrarily reinstates long overdue claims without any viable justification under the law.”
Lawyers said the law violates the New York State Constitution, is a violation of due process, and is “a clear abuse of legislative power.”
They also wrote that the state, in enacting the Adult Survivors of Abuse Act, did not provide reasons “why the plaintiff’s own neglect or failure to initiate a claim within an applicable period of time should be considered an injustice to her.” According to them, the statute of limitations expired after five years.
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