Trump believed the rape accuser E. Jean Carroll was his spouse within the picture
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Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, John Johnson and Ivana Trump at an NBC party, late 1980s.
US District Court in Manhattan
Former President Donald Trump recently mistook his rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when he was questioned by her attorney about a decades-old photo of him and Carroll in a defamation lawsuit, a newly released court filing shows.
Trump’s belief that writer Carroll was actually his second wife Maples sharply refutes the New York real estate mogul’s repeated claims that he didn’t even have sex with Carroll because she was “not my type.”
Carroll, 79, first claimed in a 2019 magazine article that then-President Trump raped her in 1995 or 1996 after a chance store encounter in a fitting room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan.
Trump, 76, denied her claims and accused Carroll of lying. He also said Carroll was motivated by a desire to generate book sales and political enthusiasm in making the allegations.
“She’s not my type,” Trump told The Hill news site in 2019.
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Carroll is suing Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in two counts in Manhattan federal court for allegedly defaming her through his characterization of her claims and her alleged motivations. One case was filed in 2019 after Trump initially denied her allegations, and the second was filed this fall after he repeated his claims about her motivation.
In the most recent case, she’s also suing him for assault for alleged rape himself under a new New York state law that gives adults a year-long window to make sex abuse claims who would otherwise be too old to pursue them due to the statute of limitations .
During an Oct. 19 testimony at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., released Wednesday, Trump was shown a photo from an NBC event circa 1987.
The image shows him from behind, facing Carroll and her then-husband, television journalist John Johnson, with Trump’s then-wife, the late Ivana Trump, standing to his right.
“It’s Marla,” Trump captioned the photo.
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said, “You’re saying Marla is in this photo?”
Trump replied: “That’s Marla, yes. This is my wife.”
Real estate mogul, reality TV star and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump was first married to Czech ex-athlete Ivana Trump. After 15 years of marriage, the couple had a very public and very messy divorce in 1992 that left him . That might have stopped a lesser man from ever dating again, but “The Donald” is no shrinking purple. A year later, he had a new bride on his arm in actress and socialite Marla Maples, who was 17 years his junior. 1997 coup
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His attorney, Alina Habba, then interjected, “No, that’s Carroll.”
Trump said, “Oh, I see.”
Kaplan then said, “The person you just pointed to was E. Jean Carroll.”
When Habba Trump repeated, “That’s Carroll,” he replied, “That’s Carroll?”
Elsewhere in the statement, Trump said of Carroll, “She’s not my type.”
“She’s not a woman I would ever be attracted to,” he later added.
The filing was attached to a court filing by Carroll’s attorneys last week, but was released Wednesday after Trump’s attorneys dropped their opposition to the release.
Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered other parts of the testimony to be unsealed, ruling that Trump had no legitimate reason to keep it out of the public record in the case.
Trump married Maples in 1993, a few months after their daughter Tiffany was born. The couple, who began their romantic relationship when Trump was still married to Ivana, divorced six years later.
Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
Kaplan has scheduled the trial of Carroll’s lawsuits for April.
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