Former 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 Carroll, a writer, 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 at 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.
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."
His lawyer Alina Habba then interjected, "No, that's Carroll."
Trump said, "Oh, I see."
Kaplan then said, "The person you just pointed to was E. Jean Carroll."
When Habba repeated to Trump, "That's Carroll," he replied, "That's Carroll?"
Elsewhere in the deposition, Trump said of Carroll, "She's not my type."
"She is not a woman I would ever be attracted to," he added later.
The deposition was attached to a court filing last week by Carroll's lawyers, but became public Wednesday after Trump's lawyers dropped their opposition to it being made public.
Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered other portions of the deposition unsealed, ruling that Trump did not have a legitimate reason to keep them out of the public record in the case.
Trump married Maples in 1993, several months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. The couple, who began their romantic relationship while Trump was still married to Ivana, divorced six years later.
Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
Kaplan has set trial in Carroll's lawsuits to begin in April.
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