Writer E. Jean Carroll filed a new lawsuit Wednesday accusing former President Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s, minutes after a New York law went into effect allowing sex abuse victims to in cases where the statute of limitations applies, to bring an action has expired.
Carroll, a longtime columnist for Elle magazine, is asking for a jury trial and seeking an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages, according to her lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Carroll said it was a first step towards accountability for all women who have been abused by a ruler.
“The new suit may ruin the former president’s Thanksgiving, but it will be nourishing to every woman who has ever been grabbed, groped, molested, pinched, shoved, assaulted, daubed or dragged through the mud by a powerful man,” she wrote .
New York’s Adult Survivors Act creates a one-year window for sexual assault survivors to assert a legal claim, even after the statute of limitations has expired. Victims must have been over the age of 18 at the time of the alleged crime.
In a separate lawsuit filed about three years ago, Carroll accused Trump of defamation after he denied the alleged sexual assault, which she first documented in a book in 2019.
Trump, who was president at the time of the book’s publication, has denied Carroll’s allegations, saying the author was “not my type.”
The libel trial is scheduled to begin in February in federal district court in Manhattan, but first the District of Columbia Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear hearings on legal issues raised by Trump’s legal team in January.
The question at issue in this hearing is whether Trump made the allegedly defamatory statements in his capacity as President of the United States and should therefore be protected from being sued in his personal capacity.
Carroll claims Trump raped her at a department store in either 1995 or 1996. In her lawsuit filed Wednesday, the writer said she did not report the rape at the time of the rape because she believed she had little chance of standing up in court against a wealthy and powerful man.
But after the “Me Too” movement empowered many women to take a stand against powerful men accused of molestation, Carroll’s attorneys wrote in the new lawsuit that “it suddenly seemed possible that even Trump could be held accountable.” “.
The lawsuit also alleges Trump has continued to defame her since 2019, citing a post on the former president’s Truth Social account that read, “E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a
Woman I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and wouldn’t be interested in meeting if I ever got the chance.”
Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women.
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