Donald Trump has a lot on plate these days, but there’s one thing that sometimes slips through the cracks: He’s being sued for defamation by E. Jean Carroll, who for years has accused the former president of sexual assault. Trump sat for a predictably testy deposition last October, and excerpts from the transcripts are only being made public now. Among the newest revelations is that he may have screwed the whole thing up by contradicting one of his long-running (and pretty darn heinous) defenses.
As per The Washington Post, during the deposition, Trump was shown a photo of Carroll from the ‘90s. Trump, as you may recall, has had said that he couldn’t have assaulted her because she’s “not my type.”
And yet when shown this photo of Carroll and asked to identify the woman it showed, Trump responded, “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” alluding to Marla Maples, his wife from 1993 to 1999 and the mother of his daughter Tiffany.
Trump’s revealing gaffe was quickly corrected by his attorney, Alina Habba.
Carroll has alleged that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-’90s. She has two separate lawsuits filed against Trump: one for allegedly defamatory comments he made about in the wake of her allegations back in 2019, and one for the incident itself.
According to transcripts, Trump used the deposition to continue to trash Carroll, calling her “mentally ill” and falsely claiming that she said that she “loved” being raped and found it “sexy” — a gross distortion of an interview she did with Anderson Cooper in 2019, in which she talked about how the term “rape” “has so many sexual connotations” and is a “fantasy” for some.
During the deposition, Trump also vowed to sue Carroll, as well as the lawyers grilling him. He may have screwed up his defense before the interrogation even began, but he also may have made it even worse.
(Via The Washington Post)