A woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago is asking him for a DNA sample to compare to male genetic material found on the dress she says she wore during the alleged encounter.
E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, alleged in a lawsuit filed in November that Trump attacked her at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in Manhattan, in the 1990s. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegation, saying last June that he had “never met this person in my life.”
Her lawyers served an attorney for Trump with papers on Thursday requesting the President’s DNA be obtained on March 2.
The papers included test results from a black Donna Karan dress Carroll says she wore the day of the alleged assault, from which a lab collected biological material.
The results note that “acid phosphatase activity, a presumptive indication of the presence of semen, was not detected in any of thirty-three fluorescent stains tested on the dress.” However, samples tested from the dress sleeve contained genetic material that analysts described as coming from at least one “male,” according to the filing.After Carroll went public with her account last year, Trump denied the incident had occurred, calling it “totally false.” Carroll’s lawsuit, filed in New York state Supreme Court, said his responses were “false” and “defamatory.”
“After Trump sexually assaulted me, I took the black dress I had been wearing and hung it in my closet. I only wore it once since then and that was at the photoshoot for the New York Magazine article about my book,” Carroll said in a statement Thursday.
“Unidentified male DNA on the dress could prove that Donald Trump not only knows who I am, but also that he violently assaulted me in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman and then defamed me by lying about it and impugning my character.”
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, added that “testing unidentified male DNA on the dress she wore during that assault has become standard operating procedure in these circumstances given the remarkable advances in DNA technology, particularly where, as is the case here, other potential contributors have been excluded.” Referring to a request to sample Trump’s saliva to test his DNA, Kaplan said, “There really is no valid basis for him to object.”
An attorney for Trump, Lawrence S. Rosen, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carroll, who has been an advice columnist for Elle magazine for 26 years, first detailed her accusations against Trump last year through an excerpt of her book published in New York magazine.
In the excerpt, Carroll claims that she encountered “one of New York’s most famous men” in the fall of 1995 or spring 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman, where, she says, he attacked her in one of the dressing rooms after pressing her to try on lingerie. She said Trump pushed her against the dressing room wall, where he “unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.” She says she fought against Trump.
After Trump denied the initial accusations last June, she sued him for defamation in November over what she says were his lies denying her public accusation.
