Trump calls rape accusation a 'hoax' in deposition excerpts

Donald Trump called a rape accusation against him a “hoax” and denied ever kissing or touching women without their consent, according to excerpts from a deposition released Friday.

A federal judge in New York unsealed parts of a transcript of Trump’s deposition in a lawsuit by magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused the former president of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

"It is a hoax and a lie just like all the other hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” the former president maintained in the videotaped deposition taken Wednesday at his Florida residence of Mar-a-Lago.

“She's accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is,” Trump said, further reiterating his words in a previous social media post stating that Carroll is “not my type” and a “nut job.”

Carroll’s lawyer also pressed Trump on unrelated topics — like his view of mail-in ballots, which he said he considered a hoax, even though he acknowledged he has voted by mail at times. He also said he considered global warming “largely a hoax.”

In excerpts of Carroll’s deposition, the writer said she was “in shock and disordered” and left “unbalanced” by the alleged assault, adding that the statements Trump made in response to her public accusation in 2019 “totally affected” her life.

“I lost my job. I'm looked at as a woman who's untrustworthy, looked at now as a woman who can't be believed. I'm looked at as a woman who was stupid and dumb enough to have happen to her what happened to her,” she said.

After Trump’s public disparagement of her, Carroll initially sued Trump for defamation and, in November, for battery. In his deposition, Trump repeatedly referred to the action as a “waste of time” that was motivated by politics.

Trump’s lawyers had sought to keep some three-dozen pages of excerpts under seal on confidentiality grounds, arguments district court Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected as “entirely baseless” before the transcript’s release. Kaplan on Friday also denied Trump’s motion to dismiss Carroll’s lawsuit.

"We are pleased though not surprised that Judge Kaplan denied Donald Trump's motion to dismiss and upheld the constitutionality of New York's Adult Survivors Act," Roberta Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, said in a statement. "We look forward to trial in April."

Trump's legal representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his deposition, Trump further denied ever kissing or touching a woman without her consent, or pressuring a woman to have sex with him.

“The answer is no,” the president stated under oath.

Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was roiled by the release of a videotaped interview in which the candidate made crude and sexually aggressive comments about women, and the former president has faced dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct in his time as a media and real-estate magnate before he ran for office.

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” Trump said in the 2005 Access Hollywood interview. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything.”

Kyle Cheney and Kierra Frazier contributed to this report.