Journalist who claims Trump raped her wants his DNA
Lawyers for a magazine columnist who has accused Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s have asked the US president to provide a DNA sample.
E Jean Carroll’s legal team want to determine whether Mr Trump’s genetic material is on a dress the journalist says she was wearing during the alleged encounter.
The legal team served notice to a lawyer for Mr Trump to submit a sample from his cheek, blood or skin cells in Washington on 2 March.
The sample would be used for “analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress”.
While the notice is a demand, such demands often spur court fights requiring a judge to weigh in on whether they will be enforced.
Ms Carroll filed a defamation suit against Mr Trump in November after the president denied her rape allegation.
She said the US president had smeared her and damaged her career as a long-time Elle magazine advice columnist by calling her a liar.
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Roberta Kaplan, her lawyer, has had Ms Carroll’s black wool coat-style dress tested.
A lab report with the legal notice says DNA found on the sleeves was a mix of at least four contributors, at least one of them male.
Several other people were tested and eliminated as possible contributors to the mix, according to the lab report.
Their names are redacted.
Ms Carroll said in a statement on Thursday: “Unidentified male DNA on the dress could prove that Donald Trump not only knows who I am but also that he violently assaulted me in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman and then defamed me by lying about it and impugning my character.”
Trump dismisses E Jean Carroll’s rape allegation as ‘fake news’
Ms Kaplan said it was “standard operating procedure” to request a DNA sample from the accused in a sexual assault allegation.
She added: “As a result, we’ve requested a simple saliva sample from Mr Trump to test his DNA, and there really is no valid basis for him to object.”
Mr Trump’s lawyers could ask the New York state judge overseeing the defamation case not to require a sample.
A lawyer for the US president also tried to get the defamation case thrown out.
A Manhattan judge declined to do so earlier this month, saying the lawyer had not properly backed up his arguments that the case did not belong in a New York court.
Ms Carroll has accused Mr Trump of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan luxury department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in the mid-1990s.
The journalist wrote in a New York magazine piece in June that she and Mr Trump met by chance.
She added that they chatted and went to a lingerie department for Mr Trump to pick out a gift for an unidentified woman.
Ms Carroll said banter about trying on a bodysuit ended in a dressing room, where she said Mr Trump reached under her black wool dress, pulled down her tights and raped her as she tried to fight him off.
She added that she eventually escaped.
Ms Carroll wrote: “The Donna Karan coat dress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening.”
She wore it for a photo accompanying the magazine piece.
Mr Trump said in June that Ms Carroll was “totally lying” and he had “never met this person in my life”.
While a 1987 photo shows them and their then-spouses at a social event, Mr Trump dismissed it as a moment when he was “standing with my coat on in a line”.
He said in a statement on the matter: “She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation.”
Mr Trump added that the book “should be sold in the fiction section”.
