Donald Trump asks judge to allow ‘Access Hollywood’ tape rebuttal

Donald Trump’s legal team said the former president should be allowed to testify at the upcoming civil defamation trial involving writer E. Jean Carroll, including to defend the notorious Access Hollywood tape.

Trump attorney Alina Habba accused Carroll’s lawyers of trying to “pigeonhole” the former president after they called on the judge overseeing the proceedings in New York to give the Republican clear guidelines about what he can and cannot say if he takes the stand in his defense.

Carroll is suing Trump over claims the former president defamed her character while denying that he sexually assaulted her at a New York department store in the 1990s, including alleging that she made up the attack to sell copies of her 2019 book. A civil trial to settle the case will begin on Tuesday, January 16.

The suit is separate from the sexual battery and defamation lawsuit that Carroll has already won against Trump, in which a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the former Elle columnist at a Bergdorf Goodman store, and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages in May 2023.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has already ruled Trump’s lawyers can’t try and argue to the jury that the former president didn’t rape or sexually assault Carroll, or that she fabricated the attack, as it is not relevant to the defamation case.

Carroll’s lawyers wrote to Kaplan asking him to limit what Trump can say if he testifies under oath in New York, such as imposing “robust prophylactic measures” to ensure that Trump does not present “inadmissible, prejudicial, or otherwise improper” information to the jury.

Habba has now also written to Kaplan, accusing Carroll’s lawyers of “another desperate attempt to pigeonhole” Trump and his legal team’s preparation for the upcoming trial.

Habba said that Trump should be allowed to defend himself since the Access Hollywood tape, which emerged just ahead of the 2016 presidential election, had been admitted into evidence against the former president in the trial. Trump was recorded boasting that he can grab women “by the p****” while being interviewed for Access Hollywood in 2005. Trump later dismissed the comments at the time as “locker room talk.”

Habba has accused the courts of “completely hamstringing” Trump’s ability to discuss “virtually anything related to Ms. Carroll’s narrative,” but still allowing the Access Hollywood tape into evidence.

“President Trump should certainly be allowed to differentiate, and testify those purported incidences from Ms. Carroll’s allegations,” Habba wrote.

“Those incidents are not barred by res judicata or collateral estoppel, and if the Court is so inclined to admit such evidence, including the Access Hollywood tape, which the Court has already admitted, President Trump has the right to rebut those accounts and provide his version of the events.”

Carroll’s legal team declined to comment when contacted by Newsweek.

In his decision to allow the tape into evidence in the defamation civil trial, Kaplan said a jury might find it useful as it may suggest a pattern of behavior for Trump, as well as his attitudes to Carroll and other women.

“The jury could find that Mr. Trump was prepared to admit privately to sexual assaults eerily similar to that alleged by Ms. Carroll,” the judge said.

In September 2023, Kaplan ruled that Trump had defamed Carroll with his 2019 comments, and the upcoming trial will determine how much Trump will have to pay Carroll in damages.

01/15/2024: This article has been updated to reflect Carroll’s legal team declining to comment.