E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump
Hoping to fend off the former president’s motion to dismiss, writer E. Jean Carroll’s legal team cited a recent and high-profile precedent to advance her lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of rape: the Prince Andrew case that ended in a multi-million dollar settlement against the disgraced royal.
Just like the one against the prince, the lawsuit against the former president levels accusations of rape that would have been barred under the statute of limitations — had the New York legislature not taken action.
Carroll’s complaint, in particular, alleges that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.
In defending her claims, Carroll received help from a precedent established in a lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre, who claimed that Andrew sexually abused her.
Before the reported $16 million deal, Prince Andrew’s legal team tried to argue that New York’s Child Victims Act unconstitutionally suspended the statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims. Trump’s lawyer argued something similar as to the Empire State’s similar Adult Survivors Act (ASA).
But as Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan noted in a legal brief on Wednesday, the prince’s arguments failed before the same federal judge who is hearing the case against the former president.
“Conceding that the claim has recently been revived by New York’s Adult Survivors Act (ASA), Trump insists that the ASA violates the Due Process Clause of the New York State Constitution,” Carroll’s legal brief states. “He is mistaken: the ASA is a reasonable measure passed by the New York legislature to remedy an identifiable injustice. Trump’s assertion that the ASA is unconstitutional because adult victims of sexual assault have only themselves to blame for not coming forward sooner is offensive and wrong. Indeed, Trump does not even cite this Court’s on-point opinion in Giuffre v. Andrew, 579 F. Supp. 3d 429 (S.D.N.Y. 2022)—which the Court raised with his counsel at the status conference on December 21, 2022, and which fatally undercuts his attack on the ASA.”
When Prince Andrew raised similar constitutional objections roughly a year ago, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found them “without merit.” The judge, who has no relation to the lawyer of the same surname, deadpanned that one of Prince Andrew’s arguments was “not a dog that’s going to hunt.”
Carroll’s legal brief, spanning 22 pages in total, is dedicated in large part to a spirited defense of laws designed to give sexual abuse survivors a look-back period to file historic claims.
“More broadly, Trump contends that there is no imaginable injustice in holding adult survivors of sexual assault to the original limitations period,” the brief states. “In support of this position, he implies that the CVA was upheld for only a single reason (which in his view does not apply here): namely, that it applied to juvenile victims who ‘lack[ed] competence’ to sue and suffered from a ‘particularly insidious and long-term mental block’ justifying the revival of otherwise-barred civil claims.”
“Every premise and every conclusion of Trump’s argument is wrong,” it continues.
Since the Adult Survivors Act’s passage, a flood of litigation has hit the courts against high-profile defendants, including Trump, ex-hedge fund honcho Leon Black, ex-Fox News host Ed Henry, and two major banks: JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche, which stand accused of “complicity” with Epstein.
Read Carroll’s new filing here.
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