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Trump mistook rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for ex-wife Marla Maples in deposition about photo



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Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsDonald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, John Johnson and Ivana Trump at an NBC party, late 1980s.U.S. District Court in ManhattanFormer President Donald Trump recently mistook his rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when being questioned about a decades-old photo of him and Carroll by her attorney for a defamation lawsuit, a newly public court filing shows.Trump’s belief that the writer Carroll was actually his second wife Maples sharply undercuts the New York real estate mogul’s repeated claims that he would not have even had sex with Carroll because she is “not my type.”Carroll, 79, first alleged in a 2019 magazine article that Trump, who was president at the time, had raped her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996 after a chance encounter in the store.Trump, 76, denied her claims, accusing Carroll of lying. He also said Carroll was motivated by a desire to generate sales of a book and political animus in making the allegations.”She’s not my type,” Trump told The Hill news site in 2019.CNBC PoliticsRead more of CNBC’s politics coverage:Carroll is suing Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in two cases in federal court in Manhattan for allegedly defaming her by his characterization of her claims and her purported motivation. One case was filed in 2019, after Trump first denied her allegations, and the second was filed this fall, after he repeated his claims about her motivation.In the most recent case, she is also suing him for battery, for the alleged rape itself, under a new New York state law that opens a one-year window for adults to lodge claims of sexual abuse that otherwise would be too old to pursue because of the statute of limitations.During an Oct. 19 deposition at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, which was made public Wednesday, Trump was shown a photo from an NBC event around 1987.The image shows him from behind, facing Carroll and her then-husband, television journalist John Johnson, with Trump’s then-wife, the late Ivana Trump standing to his right.”It’s Marla,” said Trump about the photo.Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said, “You’re saying Marla is in this photo?”Trump replied: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”Real estate mogul, reality television star and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump was first married to Czech former athlete Ivana Trump. After 15 years of marriage, the pair had a very public and very messy divorce in 1992, which cost him . This might have discouraged a lesser m …

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