Former President Donald Trump appeared for a deposition Wednesday in connection to a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, the magazine columnist who accused him of raping her in the 1990s.
The former president gave answers to lawyers representing Carroll regarding the allegation she made in a 2019 New York Magazine article. In the article, Carroll alleged that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan, the AP reported. She sued the former president after he accused her of lying for financial and political reasons, according to CNBC.
The deposition occurred after a federal judge rejected Trump’s attempt to delay the scheduled questioning over a pending appeal in the lawsuit, AP News reported.
“We’re pleased that on behalf of our client, E. Jean Carroll, we were able to take Donald Trump’s deposition today. We are not able to comment further,” Kaplan Hecker & Fink, the law firm representing Carroll, said in a statement, the outlet reported.
TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump comes out of the Oval Office for his departure from the White House on September 16, 2019 in Washington, DC. – President Trump is traveling to Albuquerque, New Mexico to deliver remarks at a “Keep America Great Rally”. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
It is unknown what Trump stated during the deposition, though his attorney, Alina Habba, told the Daily Caller that the former president is satisfied with the deposition and branded the case as a “political ploy” to hurt him.
“As we have said all along, my client was pleased to set the record straight today,” Habba said. “This case is nothing more than a political ploy like many others in the long list of witch hunts against Donald Trump.” (RELATED: E. Jean Carroll Lawyers Request Trump’s DNA Amid Rape Allegation)
The former president has previously denied Carroll’s allegations as a “hoax and a lie,” the outlet reported. The Trump-era White House also deemed the accusations as false, saying at the time, “this is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad,” according to Politico.
Carroll was scheduled for her deposition Friday, and like Trump, no details have been released about the event, the outlet reported. A trial for the case is scheduled for February, according to CNBC.
The Justice Department, under the authority of then-Attorney General Bill Barr, planned to replace the former president as the defendant in the case given that he was the sitting president at the time, and because the Justice Department cannot be sued for defamation, the lawsuit would have ended, CNBC reported. In September, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump was a government employee at the time, but they turned to an appeals court in Washington D.C. to rule on whether he made the comments about Carroll within the scope of his employment at the time of the remark.