Judge allows ‘Access Hollywood’ tape into upcoming Trump rape trial
An excerpt from a notorious “Access Hollywood” tape in which former President Donald Trump seems to brag about sexually assaulting women will be allowed into evidence at his upcoming trial in the alleged rape of writer E. Jean Carroll.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said Trump’s statements on the 2005 recording — in which he described moving on a woman “like a b–ch” — could lead a jury to infer that Trump has assaulted or attempted to assault women in the past.
“In this case, a jury reasonably could find, even from the Access Hollywood tape alone, that Mr. Trump admitted in the Access Hollywood tape that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so,” Kaplan wrote in the ruling Friday.
The former advice columnist sued Trump for defamation in 2020 for statements he made denying he ever sexually assaulted her.
Carroll alleges the former president raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.
She filed a related suit in 2022 for the alleged attack under New York’s Child Victims Act, which allowed sexual assault accusers to sue over claims that would have previously been barred by the statute of limitations.
A Manhattan federal trial is scheduled for April.
In her suit, Carroll alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in 1995 or 1996 at Bergdorf’s after the pair coincidentally ran into each other in the luxury department store.
Carroll first made her claims public in a front-page 2019 New York Magazine article that was an excerpt from a since-published book.
Trump repeatedly denied the allegations, calling it a “hoax” and claiming Carroll was “totally lying” about the encounter.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,” Trump told The Hill in 2019.
A lawyer for Trump declined to comment.
