There is another legal case former President Donald Trump is facing amid his indictment at the hands of woke leftist prosecutor Alvin Bragg, and jury selection for the E. Jean Carroll’s civil trial begins this week.
The case centers around longtime Elle Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of groping and raping her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room — a luxury department store — in the mid-1990s.
However, it is important to note Trump is not facing criminal charges. Rather, Carroll is seeking monetary damages as well as a retraction of remarks Trump previously made. She first came forward with the allegations in 2019 as she promoted her book highlighting “hideous men” from her life. It is titled, What Do We Need Men For? She claims to have been sexually assaulted well over a dozen times throughout her life and filed this particular suit in November after the Adult Survivors Act went into effect, essentially nixing the statute of limitations for this case. Notably, she sued Trump for defamation in 2019 as well.
Trump has forcefully denied her allegations, even adding that she is “not my type.”
“The lawsuit argues the denial of Carroll’s allegations is defamatory and caused her emotional, reputational and professional harm,” CNN reported.
Last year, Trump dismissed it as a “complete con job” and doubled down on Wednesday.
“The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM. Her lawyer is a political operative, financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist, only to get caught lying about that,” Trump said on Wednesday.
He continued:
Just look at her CNN interview before & after the commercial break – Like a different person. She said there was a dress, using the ol’ Monica Lewinsky “stuff”, then she didn’t want to produce it. The dress should be allowed to be part of the case. This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!
Indeed, one of Carroll’s attorneys is Roberta Kaplan — a Democrat Party activist who led the group Time’s Up. She left the activist group after it was revealed she was aiding former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in attempting to discredit the Democrat’s accusers. It served as a great irony as Time’s Up seeks to defend women from what it claims is discrimination and harassment. This fact has led to mounting speculation that Kaplan only gets involved in cases that she views as politically expedient.
Further, Federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan is overseeing the process and has connections to Carroll’s other attorney, Shawn Crowley. She was actually a law clerk for Judge Kaplan, and he officiated her wedding.
That aside, Trump has denied knowing the left-wing activist as the only evidence of any contact is a single picture with Carroll greeting Trump and his ex-wife Ivanna at an event greeting line over 35 years ago. Carroll has yet to provide solid evidence of this alleged encounter and will not use the dress that she claims had DNA on it from this alleged incident. Even Trump publicly said the dress should be part of the case. Further, there are no eyewitnesses of this alleged incident, which supposedly occurred at the popular New York City department store.
“They got caught lying! The Miss Bergdorf Goodman case is financed by a big political donor that they tried to hide,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday.
“Does anybody believe that I would take a then almost 60 year old woman that I didn’t know, from the front door of a very crowded department store, (with me being very well known, to put it mildly!), into a tiny dressing room, and …. her,” he continued.
“ She didn’t scream? There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this? She never made a police complaint? If I was seen there with a woman-BIG PRESS. SCAM!” he added:
Trump is referencing billionaire Reid Hoffman, a major donor to Democrats, whom Carroll admitted is majorly funding her case.
“Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a harsh critic of former President Donald J. Trump, has helped pay for a lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, the New York magazine writer who sued Mr. Trump for rape and defamation, according to newly filed court papers in the case,” the New York Times reported this month.
Hoffman’s disdain for Trump is no secret, either. He said in a recent interview that he would “spend as much as I possibly can and it takes and is effective [to beat Trump].”
Hoffman’s chief political adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn also identified their goal as “weakening the political power of the anti-American Trump-MAGA movement.”
“Our political philanthropy is focused on weakening the political power of the anti-American Trump-MAGA movement,” he said last year, per CNBC. “Far left groups, such as the Justice Democrats, help the MAGA movement by attacking centrist Democrats who can win general elections.”
Trump, according to reports, is unlikely to appear in the courtroom during the trial.
Hoffman, meanwhile, appeared reluctant to publicly admit his involvement in Carroll’s case and finally addressed it in a LinkedIn post this month.
“In general, I prefer to talk about these values and ideas over commenting on specific gifts that I’ve made. But there is a theme to a number of them: protecting the rule of law from the threat posed by Donald Trump’s scorched-earth legal methods,” he wrote, asserting that “Trump’s hostility to women has been a dominant feature of his ideology for his entire adult life.”
New York Magazine Cover of E. Jean Carroll
“Supporting women fighting for progress and justice in philanthropy, politics, and business has been a longstanding priority of mine, as is supporting America against the threat of Trump—a stance that I’ve not only made public, but also have prioritized over recent years,” he continued, listing some of his other political objectives as of late as well:
For instance, in addition to E. Jean Carroll, grantees I have supported include:
– Lisa Rosenberg, whose group Open the Government has helped train citizens on how to use Freedom of Information Act requests to expose government abuses against women and families;
– Third-party litigation support for clients of attorney Roberta Kaplan, who held the Charlottesville rioters accountable under the Ku Klux Klan Act, and who is now representing one of the many women who has credibly accused Trump of sexual violence; and
– Litigation under the Fourteenth Amendment to block insurrectionists from holding office.
He then denied keeping his support of Carroll a secret, writing that he has “never taken any steps to hide the financial support that I have provided to this lawsuit after it started.”
This is hardly Hoffman’s first foray into funding political hits, donating over 600,000 to the Legal Defense Fund for Fusion GPS, the entity behind the debunked anti-Trump Steele dossier. He also backed the dark money front group and leftist tech company ACRONYM, and he has ties to the late-Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile. According to a March 2020 Washington Free Beacon piece, the billionaire “put Epstein in contact with others for fundraising purposes after the child molester had been charged with sex crimes.”
Hoffman is also a strong supporter of President Joe Biden, contributing $1 million to the pro-Biden Unite The Country Super PAC in 2019.
Trump is not expected to appear in court.