With former President Donald Trump’s rape trial just days away, efforts to prevent jurors from hearing about another incident — when Trump reportedly forced himself into a different journalist – fell flat on Monday.
The federal judge overseeing the case ruled that Trump’s legal team was too late to appeal. And now jurors are about to hear about a separate incident that could show a pattern of sexual assault by the former president.
It is the latest sign that the rape case against Trump, which has been worked on for years, may not get its way — after he has faced setback after setback.
Trump is on trial in Manhattan this week for allegedly raping magazine journalist E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a luxury department store in the mid-1990s. Carroll could only expand her civil defamation lawsuit — essentially going after Trump for alleging that Carroll lied — to a more serious battery lawsuit, after New York passed a state law in November 2022 that allowed alleged victims of sexual assault civil bring proceedings after the statute of limitations had expired. Carroll filed her extensive lawsuit just hours after the law went into effect.
Judge does not give Trump a free pass for missing rape case
The incident that Trump’s lawyers tried to suppress in court is a distinctly similar episode; years after the alleged Carroll rape, a People magazine journalist alleged that Trump also sexually assaulted her.
Trump’s team argued that the incident was so different that jurors shouldn’t hear about it because Trump reportedly “only touched her shoulders and kissed her, and never touched or attempted to touch her genitals.”
While U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan declined to rule on the merits of Trump’s lawyers’ argument, he ultimately sided with Carroll’s lawyers and will allow the former People magazine correspondent, Natasha Stoynoff, to testify in the case.
In a letter Saturday, Trump attorney Joe Tacopina asked the federal judge to reconsider its earlier decision to allow Stoynoff to testify about her experience with the real estate magnate in 2005 — about a decade after the alleged Carroll incident.
That’s when Stoynoff, in command for People, traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s South Florida estate, for a celebrity story about Trump’s one-year wedding anniversary to his pregnant wife, Melania. As Stoynoff would recall a decade later, Melania apologized midway through the interview to go upstairs and change her outfit for the photo shoot. Then Trump decided to show the reporter the mansion and lead her to a particular room he wanted her to see — then close the door behind them.
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“Within seconds he pushed me against the wall and pushed his tongue down my throat,” Stoynoff said in a 2016 People column. Trump was interrupted when his butler “burst into the room a minute later, while I was trying to free myself.” As they waited for his wife on a patio, Stoynoff recalled fiddling with her tape recorder when Trump leaned forward and said, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?”
Stoynoff also claimed that the next morning, when she showed up late at the Mar-a-Lago spa to enjoy a massage session she had booked, the receptionist told her that “Mr. Trump was waiting for you here” but had left after 15 minutes “for a meeting”. When she returned to New York City, Stoynoff asked her editors to take her off the Trump beat and never interviewed him again.
Trump has called Stoynoff “a liar,” and tweeted in 2017 that it was all “FAKE NEWS”.
Trump also addressed Stoynoff’s accusations at an October 2016 rally, where he famously begged the crowd to “take a look” at Stoynoff. “Look at her, look at her words, tell me what you think. I don’t think so,’ he said to loud applause.
Despite the attacks, Stoynoff has stood behind her story for years.
Last month, Judge Kaplan ruled that Carroll can call Stoynoff as a witness to strengthen her case. Trump’s lawyers tried, but failed, to block a mountain of evidence from entering the trial, including video clips showing all the misogynistic things Trump has said over the years. The list ranges from speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he berated women who accuse him of sexual misconduct to the leaked Access to Hollywood tape on which he infamously bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Judge denies Trump’s DNA test gambit in rape case
The last-minute efforts of Trump’s legal team hint at just how damning Stoynoff’s testimony at trial could be, and on Saturday, Tacopina asked Judge Kaplan to carefully review the details in Stoynoff’s story in hopes that the judge see a difference between sexual harassment and assault.
“Your Honor rightly noted that Trump, according to Ms. Stoynoff, did not touch Ms. Stoynoff’s genitals,” Tacopina wrote, continuing that Stoynoff “does not specify what part of her anatomy she believes Mr. Trump is touching.”
Tacopina then requested that the judge distinguish between forced kissing and sexual groping because only the more serious charge would allow Stoynoff to testify. That’s because federal rules of evidence say a court may recognize evidence of someone’s previous sexual assault, but there’s a threshold to meet that definition.
Tacopina wrote that “kiss alone” would not reach that bar.
Tacopina quotes from Carroll’s own interview with Stoynoff in 2020, when Stoynoff said, “I feel if he had done something more serious – more sexual, that had to do with genitals – I would have told my superiors.”
On Sunday, Carroll’s lawyers fired back in a letter of their own dunking Trump’s team for the last-minute request. Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, explained how Trump’s lawyers have once again screwed up their own legal strategy by waiting until it’s too late to actually analyze the documents they’ve had. She noted that Trump’s lawyers missed the 14-day deadline to appeal the judge’s earlier decision and that they’ve had Stoynoff’s statement for seven months.
Kaplan also pointed out that Trump’s alleged conduct at Mar-a-Lago “violated at least two Florida statutes, thus meeting the crime requirement.”
The federal judge ruled Monday afternoon that Tacopina’s request was “untimely” and that any attempt to get him to reconsider “should have been made well in advance of this request.”
The Trump team’s 11th hour gamble is one of many they’ve tried and failed on a rape case nearly four years in the making. The case has been subject to numerous delaying tactics by the former president.
Last week, his team raised concerns that the billionaire founder of LinkedIn may have secretly funded Carroll’s lawsuit — something Carroll’s lawyers also don’t want the jurors to hear.
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