President Trump will not get favor from Department of Justice over Jean Carroll case

Listen to this article

US President Donald Trump will not get favor from the Justice Department because a federal judge blocked the efforts of DOJ to intervene in a defamation case against him. The case was brought by E. Jean Carroll as she claimed the President that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s, but he denied her claim. The U.S District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected the central argument of the government that Trump was acting in his official duties as president last year when he denied magazine writer Carroll’s allegation that he had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York City. The intervention of the US Department of Justice was seen as an effort to shield the President from the potentially damaging legal action in the midst of a re-election campaign.

It is noteworthy that the judge’s ruling effectively keeps Carroll’s claim alive. The judge wrote, “The undisputed facts demonstrate that President Trump was not acting in furtherance of any duties owed to any arguable employer when he made the statements at issue. His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States. To conclude otherwise would require the Court to adopt a view that virtually everything the president does is within the public interest by virtue of his office. The government has provided no support for that theory, and the Court rejects it as too expansive”.

Point to be noted that Carroll said she was happy with the judge’s decision and would continue pursuing her case. She said, “When I spoke out about what Donald Trump did to me in a department store dressing room, I was speaking out against an individual. When Donald Trump called me a liar and denied that he had ever met me, he was not speaking on behalf of the United States. As the Judge recognized today, the question of whether President Trump raped me twenty years ago in a department store is at the heart of this lawsuit”. The lawyer of Carroll said the President’s current office should not be used to shield his prior personal conduct. Attorney Roberta Kaplan said, “The simple truth is that President Trump defamed our client because she was brave enough to reveal that he had sexually assaulted her”.