Trump Calls NY Sexual-Abuse Law Unconstitutional in Rape Accuser’s Suit

Erik Larson
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump said a New York law temporarily allowing people to sue over alleged sexual abuse that may have occurred decades earlier was violating the constitutional rights of “countless people,” including himself.

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Trump made the argument late Wednesday in a motion to dismiss author E. Jean Carroll’s civil battery suit against him under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which went into effect Nov. 24. Carroll alleges Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. He has denied her claim.

The new law is a “clear abuse of legislative power” that violates the due process rights in New York’s constitution, Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, wrote in the motion filed in Manhattan federal court.

“The Adult Survivors Act, well-intentioned as it may be, is a fundamentally flawed law that is unable to withstand constitutional scrutiny,” Habba said. The law “inherently deprives countless individuals of their constitutional right to due process by forcing them to defend against these once-stale claims.”

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement that she believes the case will go forward. “Nothing in their filing last night changes that,” she said.

New York’s statute of limitations on such claims was raised to 20 years from just one year in 2019, but the change wasn’t retroactive. The Adult Survivors Act was intended to fill the gap by creating a one-year window for victims to file civil suits no matter how old their claims may be.

Due-Process Concerns

Critics say the coming flood of lawsuits under the law raises due-process concerns because of the difficulty of defending older claims. Trump is one of the first defendants to challenge the constitutionality of the Adult Survivors Act.

Carroll previously sued Trump for defamation after he publicly denied her rape claim in 2019. She included a new defamation claim in her battery lawsuit over an Oct. 12 social-media posting in which he accused her — again — of fabricating the attack to help sell a book.

Habba argued in Wednesday’s filing that Carroll’s new defamation claim should also be dismissed as “a rehash of the defamation claim she brought over three years ago” and because it was “baseless and legally defective due to failure to demonstrate cognizable damages.”

Carroll, a former advice columnist with Elle magazine, argues the former president’s October social-media post damaged her reputation as a self-publishing journalist.

Her earlier defamation suit and the new battery suit are currently set for separate trials in April, though Carroll is seeking to have them combined.

(Updates with comment from Carroll’s lawyer.)

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