United States: The former United States President Mr. Donald Trump’s rape trial will begin next week as scheduled after US judge Lewis A Kaplan rejected a request for a one-month delay, noting the former president cannot make public statements to promote pre-trial publicity.

Mr. Kaplan, who is a federal judge in Manhattan, remarked that the civil trial on claims against Mr. Trump brought by the columnist Ms. Jean Carroll will begin as scheduled on April 25. Mr. Trump denies the rape or knowing Carroll.

Mr. Kaplan rejected arguments by Mr. Trump’s attorney Mr. Joe Tacopina that the former president’s recent indictment in New York state court on criminal falsification of business records charges had created such negative publicity that a one-month cooling-off period was needed before the rape trial could begin.

“There was, of course, a great deal of media coverage, which was invited and, indeed, provoked by Mr. Trump, first by the apparently impending indictment, then by the indictment itself, and finally by the arraignment. But the connection that Mr. Trump seeks to draw between that coverage and either the need for or the effectiveness of a ‘cooling off’ period is unsupported by any evidence,” the federal judge stated.

“It does not sit well for Mr. Trump to promote pretrial publicity and then to claim that the coverage that he promoted was prejudicial to him and should be taken into account as supporting a further delay,” the judge said, adding that he was also concerned that the request was a “delay tactic by Mr. Trump,” Mr. Kaplan added.

Ms. Carroll first sued Mr. Trump for defamation after he said she lied when she wrote in a 2019 memoir that he attacked her in the dressing room of an upscale Manhattan department store in early 1996. She brought a second lawsuit in November 2022, after New York State allowed victims to temporarily sue over sexual assaults that occurred long ago.

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