NEW YORK (AP) — A lawyer for a columnist who final yr gained a $5 million jury award in opposition to Donald Trump for intercourse abuse and defamation urged a choose Friday to take robust measures to make sure the previous president does not “sow chaos” when a brand new jury considers subsequent week if he owes much more in damages.
Trump mentioned Thursday that he’ll attend the Manhattan federal court docket trial, the place a jury will take into account a request starting Tuesday by attorneys for columnist E. Jean Carroll that she be awarded $10 million in compensatory damages and thousands and thousands extra in punitive damages for statements Trump has made.
“If Mr. Trump seems at this trial, whether or not as a witness or in any other case, his latest statements and conduct strongly counsel that he’ll search to sow chaos. Certainly, he might properly understand a profit in in search of to poison these proceedings,” legal professional Roberta Kaplan wrote in a letter to the choose.
“There are any variety of the explanation why Mr. Trump would possibly understand a private or political profit from deliberately turning this trial right into a circus,” Kaplan mentioned.
She mentioned she apprehensive about “the chance that he’ll search to testify, and the related threat that he’ll violate Court docket orders if he does so.”
She really useful that Choose Lewis A. Kaplan, who’s unrelated to the lawyer, warn the Republican frontrunner on this yr’s presidential race of the doable penalties of violating court docket orders severely limiting what Trump and his attorneys can say on the trial.
A lawyer for Trump didn’t instantly return a message in search of remark.
The choose has dominated that Trump and his attorneys can not introduce proof or arguments “suggesting or implying” that Trump didn’t sexually assault Carroll within the dressing room of a luxurious Manhattan division retailer throughout from Trump Tower in midtown. He additionally mentioned they can not say she fabricated her account of the assault or that she had monetary and political motivations to take action.
In her letter, Carroll’s lawyer urged Kaplan to require Trump to say beneath oath in open court docket however with out jurors current that he understands he sexually assaulted Carroll and that he spoke falsely with precise malice and lied when he accused her of fabricating her account and impugning her motives.
A jury final Could awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after concluding that, though there was not adequate proof to search out Trump raped Carroll, there was proof that she was sexually abused on the Bergdorf Goodman retailer, and Trump defamed her with statements he made in October 2022.
As a result of the defamation award was restricted to Trump’s fall 2022 statements, a jury subsequent week will start contemplating whether or not Carroll is entitled to further damages for statements Trump made about her claims whereas he was president in 2019 and the day after the decision final spring.
Carroll, 80, testified eventually yr’s trial that she has suffered emotionally and in her romantic life since Trump attacked her and that his extreme denunciation of claims she first made in a 2019 memoir after she was impressed by the #MeToo motion have severely broken her profession and led to threats in opposition to her.
Trump has repeatedly said that he by no means assaulted Carroll and did not know her and that he suspected she was pushed to make claims in opposition to him to advertise her ebook and for political causes.
In her letter to the choose Friday, Kaplan cited Trump’s conduct at a state court docket continuing Thursday in Manhattan the place he ignored a choose’s insistence that he preserve remarks targeted on trial-related issues, saying: “I’m an harmless man” and including that he was being “persecuted by somebody operating for workplace.”
She wrote that Trump’s conduct in state court docket “supplies a possible preview of precisely what we would count on to see at subsequent week’s trial.”
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