Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused President Trump of raping her in the 1990s, are asking for his DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress she says she wore during the alleged encounter. Lawyers for the longtime advice columnist served notice to a Trump attorney Thursday for the president to submit a sample by March 2 for “analysis and comparison against unidentified male DNA present on the dress.” Trump has vehemently denied Carroll’s allegation, which prompted her to file a defamation suit against him in November. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, subsequently had the black wool coat-style dress tested. A lab report with the legal notice says DNA was found on the sleeves of the dress, which included a mix of at least four people, at least one of them male. Several other people were tested and eliminated as possible DNA matches, the Associated Press reported. Carroll accused Trump last summer of raping her in a Manhattan luxury department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. “The Donna Karan coat-dress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening,” Carroll wrote in a New York magazine piece last June.
“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 said in a statement Thursday. Her lawyer said it was “standard operating procedure” to request a DNA sample from the accused as part of a sexual-assault investigation. Trump’s lawyer has attempted to get the case dismissed, which was rejected by a Manhattan judge earlier this month, citing that the attorney had not sufficiently argued that the case didn’t belong in a New York court.
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