E Jean. Carroll’s Lawyers Ask That Trump Not Make Defamation Trial a ‘Circus’

A lawyer for the writer E. Jean Carroll, whose latest defamation lawsuit against Donald J. Trump is scheduled for trial next week in Manhattan, asked a judge Friday to ensure that if the former president testifies, that he does not stray beyond the narrow issue in the case, with the goal of “turning this trial into a circus.”

“If Mr. Trump appears at this trial, whether as a witness or otherwise,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, wrote in a letter, “his recent statements and behavior strongly suggest that he will seek to sow chaos.”

In the letter, which comes just four days before jury selection is to begin in Federal District Court, Ms. Kaplan cited Mr. Trump’s continued derogatory public comments about Ms. Carroll and his behavior in another case involving him this week.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump attended the final day of trial in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against him, where — after the judge allowed him to argue on his own behalf — he attacked the attorney general, Letitia James, called himself the victim of fraud and assailed the judge to his face. Afterward, Mr. Trump told reporters that he also planned to attend Ms. Carroll’s trial.

“I’m going to explain I don’t know who the hell she is,” he said. “I have no idea.”

But the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, has already ruled that a jury’s verdict last May in an earlier civil trial, which found that Mr. Trump was liable for sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and had later defamed her, will carry over to the trial next week. The judge thus has limited the trial to one issue — what damages, if any, Mr. Trump must pay Ms. Carroll for defaming her on a separate occasion in 2019 when he called her allegation “totally false.”

The request by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer to constrain Mr. Trump, 77, comes as he has lashed out at her while moving among courthouses and political stops in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. On a single day recently, he issued more than 40 derisive posts about her on his Truth Social website, and last weekend, while campaigning in Iowa, he accused her of fabricating her claim and called the judge in the case a “radical Democrat in New York.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, declined to comment on Ms. Kaplan’s letter, citing trial publicity rules. The judge said Friday that Mr. Trump had until Sunday to file a response, and Ms. Habba said she would be doing so.

In her letter, Ms. Kaplan (who is not related to the judge) asked that he admonish Mr. Trump about the limited damages issue before the jury. She also asked that he require Mr. Trump to state on the record and under oath, out of the jury’s presence, that he understands that certain facts have been established.

“The court’s recent rulings leave no doubt about what is permissible and what is off-limits,” Ms. Kaplan wrote. “Mr. Trump cannot testify that he did not sexually assault Ms. Carroll. He cannot claim that he did not rape her, or did not know her, or had never seen her before. He cannot question or attack her motives for revealing that he had assaulted her. He cannot say that he was defending himself from a false accusation.”

The letter asked that Mr. Trump acknowledge he understands and accepts “all of the limits that the court has imposed on his testimony” and will act in accordance.

Mr. Trump has been attacking Ms. Carroll, 80, since 2019, when she first accused him of raping her in a book excerpt that appeared in New York magazine. She has sued him twice, and in the first case to go to trial last May, the jury awarded Ms. Carroll damages of just over $2 million for sexually abusing her and nearly $3 million for defaming her, in 2022, when he called her claim “a complete con job” and a hoax.

Because the judge found that Mr. Trump’s statements in 2019 were “substantially the same” as those that prompted the defamation award last May, there was no need to revisit the underlying facts of the assault.

Ms. Kaplan in her letter included a transcript of Mr. Trump’s remarks on Thursday to the judge who is deciding the civil fraud trial, in which the former president called the state’s case “a political witch hunt” and declared he was innocent.

“It takes little imagination to think that Mr. Trump is gearing up for a similar performance here — only this time, in front of a jury,” Ms. Kaplan wrote.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.