Judge blocks Trump lawyers from arguing about columnist’s rape claim at upcoming defamation trial
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — A judge says former President Donald Trump’s lawyers can’t present legal arguments to a jury assessing damages at a defamation trial this month on a jury’s conclusion that he didn’t rape a columnist in the mid-1990s. Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued the order Saturday in advance of a Jan. 16 trial to determine defamation damages against Trump. Trump, speaking in Iowa on Saturday, criticized the judge and columnist E. Jean Carroll. She won a $5 million award last May from a jury that concluded Trump sexually abused her in 1996 in a luxury department store dressing room and defamed her in 2022.