NEW YORK (AP) — A columnist can proceed with lawsuits alleging she was raped by former President Donald Trump in a department store a quarter century ago, a federal judge ruled Friday, upholding a temporary New York state law letting adult victims of sexual abuse sue their abusers.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said lawsuits alleging rape and defamation and seeking unspecified damages by writer E. Jean Carroll could proceed to trial because Trump's challenges were without merit.

“The fact that Mr. Trump denies Ms. Carroll’s allegations does not enter into the analysis at this stage of the case,” the Manhattan jurist wrote. “What, if anything, actually occurred must await further proceedings if the complaint withstands the present motion.”

In the ruling, Kaplan said the Adult Survivor’s Act was similar to the Child Victims Act, another New York state law that temporarily allowed victims of sexual assaults when they were children to sue their abusers years later.

“Mr. Trump has not offered any meritorious reason to reject the one-year revival period in the ASA as unreasonable when the nearly identical two-year revival period in the Child Victims Act has been accepted as reasonable by all courts to consider it,” Kaplan wrote.

Lawyers for the former president had asked the judge to toss out the lawsuit after Trump said the encounter at an upscale Manhattan department store never happened.

Trump said Carroll made the claim publicly for the first time in a 2019 book to generate book...

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