Donald Trump has launched a fresh broadside against his civil trial for rape and defamation, calling the case a disgrace.
The former US president said on Thursday he would probably attend the trial in New York but called it a political attack built on false claims by the accuser, the writer E Jean Carroll.
“I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation about me and I have a judge who’s extremely hostile,” he told reporters while playing golf at a resort he owns in Doonbeg, County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland. “I’m going to go back, and I’m going to confront this woman. This woman is a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen in our country.”
Trump repeated previous assertions that Carroll was a Democrat who invented the story to sell a memoir. “I have no idea who she is; it’s ridiculous. She made a claim, she wrote a book, she made a claim.”
Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. She is also suing him for defamation after Trump accused Carroll of lying when she went public with her account of the alleged assault in 2019.
Trump claimed the case was an attempt to derail his bid to recapture the White House in 2024, but said that in polls he remained ahead of President Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis, his possible challenger for the Republican nomination. “This is a political attack. This is the only way they think they can win the election because they’re losing.”
Asked if he was...
When a company promises to save the planet by 2050, it sounds reassuring. But what if that promise comes with no real plan, no credible evidence, and no accountability? A sweeping new study reveal...