A U.S. choose on Friday rejected Donald Trump’s effort to exclude an “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar feedback about girls from a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who says the previous president raped her within the mid-Nineties. Carroll sought to introduce an excerpt from the tape, which was recorded in 2005 and the place Trump boasted about forcing himself on girls, as proof that Trump had a propensity for sexual assaults similar to hers.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan mentioned that whereas propensity proof is ordinarily not admissible, an affordable jury may discover that Trump admitted within the tape “that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so.” Trump has denied raping Carroll. His attorneys didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. Carroll’s attorneys, by means of a spokesman, declined to remark.

The 23-page choice got here within the first of Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits over her alleged encounter with Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman division retailer dressing room in Manhattan. Carroll sued Trump in 2019 after he informed a reporter on the White House that he didn’t know Carroll, that she was not his kind, and that she made up the rape declare to promote her memoir. She sued once more in 2022 after Trump repeated his denials on-line.

In the “Access Hollywood” excerpt, Trump graphically described his unsuccessful try to have a sexual encounter with a married girl, and described himself as being interested in stunning girls. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump mentioned. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

The tape was launched in October 2016 and threatened to upend Trump’s White House run. He defeated Hillary Clinton the next month to turn out to be president. Kaplan additionally rejected Trump’s bid to exclude testimony from two different girls who claimed he sexually assaulted them.

One, Jessica Leeds, mentioned Trump groped her whereas seated beside her on a 1979 flight to New York from Texas. The different, Natasha Stoynoff, mentioned Trump attacked her in 2005 at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the place she had traveled to interview him and his spouse Melania for People journal.

Trump has denied that each incidents occurred. Carroll’s second lawsuit additionally features a battery declare below New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which lets sexual abuse victims sue their attackers even when statutes of limitations have run out. An April 25 trial is scheduled.

The instances are Carroll v. Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Nos. 20-00731 and 22-10016.

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