A federal judge issued a scathing 17-page opinion on Friday shutting down former President Donald Trump’s latest efforts to delay trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan came in response to a request from Trump to delay trial while he appeals an earlier ruling in the case.
That appeal seeks to overturn Kaplan’s decision on June 29 that Trump waived presidential immunity as a defense in Carroll’s lawsuit. But on Friday, Kaplan called that appeal “frivolous” and refused to change the scheduled trial date of Jan. 15, 2024.
The arguments in Trump’s request are “unpersuasive” and “repeat almost verbatim” those he made in previously denied requests to delay the trial, Kaplan wrote. Furthermore, Kaplan continued, the request “fails on each criterion” necessary to stay the trial, including providing proof that his appeal has any chance of success and that moving forward with the case on schedule would cause him irreparable harm.
The judge noted that Trump waited several years to claim presidential immunity in the lawsuit, which Carroll first filed in 2019.
“By litigating this case for over three years before even raising his presidential immunity defense ― and waiting another seven months between first raising his immunity defense and moving to stay this case on that basis ― Mr. Trump effectively has forfeited any claim to irreparable harm in the absence of a stay,” Kaplan wrote.
Trump’s “loss of that defense was the product of his own decision not to raise it until the tail end of this litigation,” Kaplan added. “In other words, any purported harm resulting from his having to stand trial despite a potential claim to immunity would be entirely of his own doing.”
Nor did Trump “address any of this Court’s reasoning in rejecting his argument” or provide “a single reason for the Court to find that there is any likelihood that he will succeed on appeal,” Kaplan said.
Carroll’s defamation lawsuit centers on her claims that Trump defamed her when he dismissed her rape allegations, implied she made up the attack to sell a book, and said she wasn’t his “type.”
This lawsuit is separate from the one that went to trial this spring, in which a Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. The court awarded $5 million in damages.
Earlier this month, Kaplan dismissed Trump’s defamation countersuit against Carroll, saying she was within her rights to say on CNN that Trump raped her.