E. Jean Carroll visits ‘Tell Me Everything’ with John Fugelsang in the SiriusXM Studios on July 11, 2019 in New York.

Noam Galai | Getty Images

A New York federal judge on Monday postponed indefinitely the previously scheduled April trial for the first of two lawsuits accusing former President Donald Trump of defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll after she claimed he raped her in the mid-1990s.

Judge Lewis Kaplan also denied a joint request by lawyers for Trump and Carroll to consolidate her two pending civil lawsuits against Trump into a single trial.

Kaplan in a brief order wrote that the attorneys overestimated the purported benefits of judicial economy and of avoiding potentially inconsistent rulings by combining the cases in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

He also noted that the trial previously scheduled to start April 10, for the case filed in 2019, “could prove unnecessary” if the federal appeals court that is currently reviewing the case rules that the suit is barred by law.

A spokesman for Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan — who is not related to the judge — declined to comment on the order. Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, declined to comment.

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