NEW YORK (AP) – Former President Donald Trump is willing to provide a DNA sample to compare with stains on the clothes of a woman who has accused him. of rape, even under certain conditions, his lawyer said Friday.
Attorney Joseph Tacopina told a Manhattan federal court judge in a letter that Trump would return the sample as long as lawyers for his accuser, columnist E. Jean Carroll, first provide the missing pages from a DNA report on clothing.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, called the offer a dishonest effort to delay an April trial and prejudice potential jurors.
He submitted a letter to the judge saying the sudden offer of DNA after Trump had refused to provide it for three years was a “legally frivolous delaying tactic.”
“The time has come for him to face a jury,” Kaplan wrote, noting that the period in which new facts can be obtained for the trial ends in October.
According to a court filing Thursday, Trump and Carroll are both listed as the first possible witnesses by their attorneys in a trial scheduled to begin April 24.
Carroll, 79, is suing Trump for defamation and rape, alleging that Trump turned a friendly encounter at an upscale Manhattan department store in late 1995 or early 1996 into a brutal rape.
He did not speak publicly about this until the release of a book in 2019: “What Do We Men Need?”
Trump insisted the meeting did not happenincluding during an October deposition, and his lawyer said the same in his latest court filing.
Tacopina said Carroll and his lawyers were trying to gain a publicity advantage by claiming Trump’s DNA was on the clothes he was wearing the night he said he was raped.
“Mr. Trump’s DNA is on the clothes or not,” he said.
Tacopina said Carroll’s attorneys refused to produce a dozen pages of the DNA report they obtained because “he knew his DNA was not on the clothing because the alleged sexual assault was not will happen.”
Kaplan, however, said Carroll decided to proceed with the trial without a protracted fight over DNA evidence after Trump’s repeated refusals to provide a sample.
“There is no DNA evidence in this case, and none will be introduced at trial,” Kaplan wrote.
Her client instead “gathered strong evidence that Trump sexually assaulted her” without the sample, Kaplan said.
The attorney said an expert’s report showed there was unidentified male DNA on the clothing Carroll was wearing when he met Trump, but he said it was not an isolated sample of male DNA but a mixture of DNA that will require complex analysis if the judge allows the issue to be reopened before the trial.