NEW YORK —

Former President Donald Trump's claims that absolute presidential immunity and free speech rights shield him from the defamation claims of a New York columnist were rejected Thursday by a federal judge.

The writer, E. Jean Carroll, can continue to press claims that Trump owes her at least $10 million in damages for comments he made before and after she won a $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict against him last month, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in a written opinion.

Trump tried to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds that he is entitled to absolute presidential immunity, his statements were not defamatory and that his statements were opinion protected by free speech rights.

Kaplan said Trump surrendered absolute presidential immunity as a defense by failing to assert it years ago when the lawsuit was filed. The lawsuit was delayed until recently as appeals courts considered legal issues surrounding it.

Trump countersued Carroll this week, claiming that she has libeled him by continuing to insist that he raped her even after a jury found otherwise.

After a jury returned its verdict last month in Manhattan federal court, Trump made comments on a CNN town hall that prompted Carroll to assert new defamation claims in a 2020 defamation lawsuit.

The jury award resulted from a sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit filed last November after New York state temporarily enacted a law allowing sexual assault victims to sue for damages resulting from attacks that occurred even decades earlier.

Trump's claims in the CNN broadcast mirrored statements he made while president in 2019 when Carroll published a memoir in which she claimed Trump raped her in the dressing room of a luxury midtown Manhattan department store in spring 1996.

Within hours of excerpts from the book being published in a magazine, Trump denied a rape occurred or that he ever knew Carroll.

"Mr. Trump did not merely deny Ms. Carroll's accusation of sexual assault," Kaplan wrote. "Instead, he accused Ms. Carroll of lying about him sexually assaulting her in order to increase sales of her book, gain publicity, and/or carry out a political agenda."

The judge said the main purpose of presidential immunity was to avoid diverting the president from public duties, but it was not a "get-out-of-damages-liability-free card that permits the president to say or do anything he or she desires even if that conduct is disconnected entirely from an official function."

Kaplan said he took into consideration that Carroll is now 79 years old and has pursued claims against Trump for 3 1/2 years.

"There is no basis to risk prolonging the resolution of this litigation further by permitting Mr. Trump to raise his absolute immunity defense now at the eleventh hour when he could have done so years ago," he said.

In rejecting claims that Carroll's lawsuit was about protected speech, Kaplan explained how libel and slander are handled in the courts and why Trump's statements could be construed to fit the legal definition for defamation, including that a jury had already found it so.

Trump's lawyers did not immediately comment.

Attorney Robbie Kaplan, who represents Carroll and is unrelated to the judge, said in a statement that the judge's ruling "confirms that once again, Donald Trump's supposed defenses to E. Jean Carroll's defamation claims don't work."

She added: "Today's decision removes one more impediment to the January 15 trial on E Jean's defamation damages in this case."

The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.

Donald Trump has sued E. Jean Carroll for defamation after a jury found he sexually abused the former magazine columnist and defamed her.

In a counter claim filed Tuesday night, Trump alleges that Carroll defamed him when she appeared on CNN the morning after the jury awarded her $5 million in damages. Carroll was asked about the verdict finding Trump sexually abused Carroll but did not rape her as she alleged. Carroll said, “Oh, yes he did.”

In response to the new claim, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said in a statement, “Donald Trump again argues, contrary to both logic and fact, that he was exonerated by a jury that found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.”

She added, “Trump’s filing is thus nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability for what a jury has already found to be his defamation of E. Jean Carroll. But whether he likes it or not, that accountability is coming very soon.

Video below: How key piece of Trump deposition likely led jury to find him liable of sexual abuse

The counter claim is the latest legal salvo in a multi-year legal battle between Trump and Carroll. Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he denied her allegation that he raped her in the mid-1990s in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman. Trump said he didn’t know Carroll and that she wasn’t his type.

She sued him again last year under a New York law that allowed a one-year window for civil lawsuits for survivors of sexual assault no matter when they occurred. Trump has moved for a new trial.

The 2019 defamation lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial next year, although there are still several legal issues outstanding. Carroll is seeking more than $10 million in damages in that case in part because Trump repeated statements the jury found to be defamatory after the verdict on social media and at a CNN town hall.

NEW YORK —

Former President Donald Trump rejected his last chance Sunday to testify at a civil trial where a longtime advice columnist has accused him of raping her in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996.

Trump, a Republican candidate for president in 2024, was given until 5 p.m. Sunday by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to file a request to testify. Nothing was filed.

It was not a surprise. Trump has not shown up once during the two-week Manhattan trial where writer E. Jean Carroll testified for several days, repeating claims she first made publicly in a 2019 memoir. She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages totaling millions of dollars.

The jury has also watched lengthy excerpts from an October videotaped deposition in which Trump vehemently denied raping Carroll or ever really knowing her.

Without Trump's testimony, lawyers were scheduled to make closing arguments Monday, with deliberations likely to begin on Tuesday.

After plaintiffs rested their case Thursday, Trump attorney Joe Tacopina immediately rested the defense case as well without calling any witnesses. He did not request additional time for Trump to decide to testify. Tacopina declined in an email to comment after the deadline passed Sunday.

On Thursday, Kaplan had given Trump extra time to change his mind and request to testify, though the judge did not promise he would grant such a request to reopen the defense case so Trump could take the stand.

At the time, Kaplan noted that he'd heard about news reports Thursday in which Trump told reporters while visiting his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, that he would "probably attend" the trial. Trump also criticized Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, as an "extremely hostile" and "rough judge" who "doesn't like me very much."

On the witness stand, Carroll, 79, testified that Trump, 76, raped her in spring 1996 after they met at the entrance of the midtown Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman.

She said the encounter began as a fun and flirtatious outing as Trump coaxed her into helping him shop for a gift for another woman. She said they ended up in the store's desolate lingerie section, where they teased each other to try on a see-through bodysuit.

As Carroll recalled it, laughter accompanied them into a dressing room where Trump became violent, slamming her up against a wall, pulling aside her tights and raping her before she kneed him and fled the store.

In his deposition, Trump said Carroll made it up. He called it "a false, disgusting lie" delivered by a "nut job" who was trying to stoke sales of her book.

He also repeated comments he made in statements that she was not his "type."

"She's not my type and that's 100% true," he said.

And he repeated his claims in a 2005 "Access Hollywood" video in which he bragged that men who are celebrities can grab women by the genitals without asking.

"Historically that's true with stars," he said.

Carroll sued Trump in November, minutes after New York state enacted a law allowing adult sexual assault victims to sue others even if the attacks occurred decades earlier.

Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote a letter to the judge Sunday to complain that Trump still has not removed April 26 posts on his social media network in which he called Carroll's allegations "a made up SCAM." And she noted that he repeated disparaging remarks about the trial three days ago in Ireland.

After the April 26 postings on Truth Social, Judge Kaplan, who is not related to Carroll's lawyer, said Trump's comments were "highly inappropriate" and expressed concern that Trump was trying to communicate to the jury "about stuff that has no business being spoken about."

The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.

NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump angrily lashed out Wednesday, calling the nation's legal system a “broken disgrace" after a judge ruled he must answer questions under oath next week in a defamation lawsuit lodged by a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s.

He also called the 2019 lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, “a hoax and a lie."

The outburst late in the day came hours after U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan rejected a request by his lawyers to delay a deposition scheduled for Oct. 19.

Kaplan is presiding over the case in which Carroll said Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s. He called the lawsuit “a complete con job."

“I don’t know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at a celebrity charity event," Trump said.

“She completely made up a story that I met her at the doors of this crowded New York City Department Store and, within minutes, ‘swooned' her. It is a Hoax and a lie, just like all the other Hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years," he said.

Then he grumbled: “Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to ‘Trump'!"

Carroll is scheduled to be deposed on Friday.

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said she was pleased with the judge's ruling and looked forward to filing new claims next month “and moving forward to trial with all dispatch” after New York state passed the Adult Survivors Act, allowing her to sue for damages for the alleged rape without the statute of limitations blocking it.

After Trump's statement was released, a spokesperson for Kaplan's firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, said the “latest statement from Donald Trump obviously does not merit a response.”

Trump's legal team has tried various legal tactics to delay the lawsuit and prevent him from being questioned by Carroll's attorneys. But Judge Kaplan wrote that it was time to move forward, especially given the “advanced age” of Carroll, 78, and Trump, 76, and perhaps other witnesses.

“The defendant should not be permitted to run the clock out on plaintiff’s attempt to gain a remedy for what allegedly was a serious wrong,” he wrote.

Carroll's lawsuit claims that Trump damaged her reputation in 2019 when he denied raping her. Trump's legal team has been trying to quash the lawsuit by arguing that the Republican was just doing his job as president when he denied the allegations, including when he dismissed his accuser as “not my type.”

Trump doubled down on the comment in his statement Wednesday, saying: “And, while I am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type! She has no idea what day, what week, what month, what year, or what decade this so-called 'event' supposedly took place. The reason she doesn’t know is because it never happened, and she doesn’t want to get caught up with details or facts that can be proven wrong."

Whether Trump will remain the defendant in the original lawsuit is a key question because if Trump was acting within the scope of his duties as a federal employee, the U.S. government would become the defendant in the case.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a split decision last month that Trump was a federal employee when he commented on Carroll's claims. But it asked another court in Washington to decide whether Trump's public statements occurred during the scope of his employment.

Kaplan, the judge, said Trump has repeatedly tried to delay the collection of evidence in the lawsuit.

“Given his conduct so far in this case, Mr. Trump's position regarding the burdens of discovery is inexcusable,” he wrote. “As this Court previously has observed, Mr. Trump has litigated this case since it began in 2019 with the effect and probably the purpose of delaying it.”

The judge noted that the collection of evidence for the lawsuit to go to trial was virtually concluded, except for the depositions of Trump and Carroll.

“Mr. Trump has conducted extensive discovery of the plaintiff, yet produced virtually none himself,” Kaplan said. “Completing these depositions — which already have been delayed for years — would impose no undue burden on Mr. Trump, let alone any irreparable injury.”

The judge also said the deposition could be useful when Carroll's lawyer next month files the new lawsuit.

Whether the rape occurred is central to the defamation claims, as well as the anticipated new lawsuit, the judge said.