A New York judge has refused a request from President Donald Trump to throw out advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him.
In an explosive book excerpt published in June, Carroll said Trump had raped her after the two ran into each other at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Trump not only denied the rape allegation but also denied knowing Carroll at all. He said she was lying in order to sell more books and help his political rivals.
“Each of these statements was false. Each of them was defamatory,” read Carroll’s defamation suit, filed Nov. 4.
Attorneys for Trump had argued in court documents filed last week that the suit should be tossed because New York law does not allow defamation cases over comments made out of state.
Since the “alleged defamatory statements were made by President Trump not while he was in New York, but rather while he was in Washington D.C,” Trump’s attorneys argued, the New York State Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over him.
In her response, state Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said Trump ― who was raised in New York and spent his career there before announcing that he would become an official Florida resident in late October ― had failed to provide sufficient justification.
″[N]otably, there is not even a tweet, much less an affidavit by defendant Trump in support of his motion,” Ling-Cohan wrote.
Carroll says in her suit that Trump’s attacks “smeared her integrity, honesty, and dignity,” “inflicted emotional pain and suffering,” “damaged her reputation” and “caused substantial professional harm.”
“While I can no longer hold Donald Trump accountable for assaulting me more than 20 years ago, I can hold him accountable for lying about it and I fully intend to do so,” she said in a statement in November.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham echoed Trump in response to the suit, saying Carroll was trying to “sell her trash book” and accused her of being “a fraud.”
The president has been accused of sexual misconduct ― from harassment to assault ― by more than 20 women.
CORRECTION: This article previously misidentified the New York Supreme Court as the state’s highest.