A bizarre lawsuit involving a California woman’s charge that Donald Trump raped her when she was an underage teen have resurfaced, this time in a Manhattan Federal Court.
Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential candidate, has already denounced the allegations once as “categorically false” and “disgusting.”
But the lawsuit — dismissed by a Los Angeles Federal Court judge last month — has new life and the backing of a new lawyer, although some of the salacious charges have been dropped.
Gone from the new lawsuit is an allegation that Trump threw money at the plaintiff for an abortion when she expressed fear about getting pregnant after being raped. Gone, too, is the allegation that Trump called co-defendant and accused pedophile and sex party host Jeffrey Epstein a “Jew bastard,” and her request for $100 million in damages.
But the complaint’s core allegations remain unchanged, that Trump and Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at a series of Manhattan sex parties Epstein hosted in 1994.
“Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed,” the plaintiff said in an affidavit.
Alan Garten, vice president and general counsel of the Trump Organization, said the allegations were “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated.”
Epstein has also denied the allegations. Epstein is alleged to have preyed on dozens of underage girls in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor in just one case in 2008.
The woman’s lawyer, Thomas Meagher, said the original suit, which she filed without the help of an attorney, was dismissed because it cited statutes that did not apply to the case.
The lawsuit says the woman remains traumatized by the abuse. She says that since Trump launched his campaign and received mass media coverage, she has been “subjected to daily painful reminders of the horrific acts.”
