NEW YORK – Former President Donald Trump is willing to provide a DNA sample to be compared against stains on the dress of a woman who accused him of rape, though only under certain conditions, his lawyer said Friday.
Attorney Joseph Tacopina told a Manhattan federal court judge in a letter that Trump will turn over the sample as long as lawyers for his accuser, columnist E. Jean Carroll, provide missing pages from a DNA report on the dress first.
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Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, called that offer a disingenuous effort to delay an April trial and prejudice potential jurors.
She submitted a letter to the judge saying the sudden offer of DNA after Trump refused to provide it for three years was a “legally frivolous delay tactic.”
“The time has come for him to face a jury,” Kaplan wrote, noting that the period when new facts could be unearthed for trial expired in October.
According to a court filing Thursday, Trump and Carroll are both listed as their lawyers’ first possible witnesses at a trial scheduled to start April 24.
Carroll, 79, has sued Trump for defamation and for rape, saying Trump turned a friendly encounter at a luxury Manhattan department store in late 1995 or early 1996 into a violent rape.
She did not speak publicly about it until releasing a book in 2019: “What Do We Need Men For?”
Trump has insisted the meeting never happened, including during an October deposition, and his lawyer said the same in his latest court filing.
Tacopina said Carroll and her lawyers were trying to gain a publicity advantage by claiming Trump's DNA is on the dress she wore the night she said she was raped.
“Mr. Trump's DNA is either on the dress or it is not,” he said.
Tacopina said Carroll's lawyers have declined to produce a dozen pages of the DNA report they obtained because “she knows his DNA is not on the dress because the alleged sexual assault never occurred.”
Kaplan, though, said Carroll decided to proceed to trial without a protracted battle over DNA evidence after Trump's repeated refusals to provide a sample.
“There is no DNA evidence in this case, and none will be introduced at trial,” Kaplan wrote.
Her client instead “has amassed powerful proof that Trump sexually assaulted her” without the sample, Kaplan said.
The lawyer said a report by an expert showed there was unidentified male DNA present on the dress Carroll wore when she encountered Trump, but she said it was not an isolated sample of male DNA but rather a mix of DNA that would require complex analysis if the judge permitted the issue to be reopened prior to trial.