Former US President Donald Trump faces a second judicial front tomorrow, Tuesday, in this case for a defamation case related to an alleged violation of the writer E. Jean Carroll, who will begin this Tuesday with the selection of the jury.
Trump is unlikely to attend the trial: Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has left it up to Trump and Carroll to decide whether or not to attend, and while the plaintiff’s lawyers have announced that she intends to attend all sessions, those of the former president wrote last week to Kaplan announcing that "does not wish to appear at trial".
They claimed the "logistics and financial charges" that Trump’s displacement will cause the city counting only the deployment of the secret service that would require his presence many hours before each of his interventions.
But, in addition, Trump has announced an electoral act next Thursday afternoon in New Hampshire, as part of the pre-campaign for the 2024 presidential elections, in which the former president starts as a clear favorite among the Republican candidates.
The newspaper The New York Times indicates that the trial in the court of the Federal District of Manhattan will not be very long, and could last between one and two weeks.
For the time being, Judge Kaplan has decided that the jury selected tomorrow will remain anonymous, even for the lawyers for the parties, given the possibility that they may suffer some kind of harassment or attack by Trump supporters.
THE VIEW IS NOT FOR THE RAPE, BUT FOR DEFAMATION
The trial, which opens twenty days after Trump’s first judicial front – for improper payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to silence an extramarital sexual relationship– does not refer to the accusation of rape in fitting rooms of a New York department store in the mid-1990s, an accusation that will be heard in a separate proceeding.
In this case, the accusation of defamation that Carroll, 79, presents against Trump, 76, is tried. for the attacks that he made against her when denouncing in public in 2019 those facts: at that time, while he was still president, he said that the complaint was "a joke and a lie" and that what she was looking for was free fame to promote a book.
The fact that rape and defamation are not judged in the same process is explained by the fact that a alleged rape committed 25 years ago was already prescribed in 2019but the state of New York opened in 2022 a legal window of one year to report statute of limitations sexual crimes.
Trump’s legal team has tried to delay the opening of the new case by presenting several requests to Judge Kaplan, the last of them alleging that a period of "calm" to be able to objectively choose the jury, but the judge has stopped all those attempts.