US: Trump testifies in case filed by abuse accuser

On Wednesday, former US president Donald Trump testified in a defamation case pitting him against a prominent former American columnist E Jean Carroll, 78, who says he sexually assaulted her from a New York department store, in the 1990s.

Last week, a New York federal court judge rejected a motion by Trump — who has denied the accusation — to further delay his deposition.

The New York law firm representing Carroll said in a statement:

"We're pleased that on behalf of our client ... we were able to take Donald Trump's deposition today."

The firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, said it was "not able to comment further".

In ruling on the deposition last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan said that Carroll's and Trump's depositions should be held on October 14 and 19, respectively.

It is not known if Carroll testified last Friday.

It also was not immediately clear if Trump submitted the sworn deposition from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

On Tuesday, Carroll shared a photo of her lawyer Roberta Kaplan on Twitter, captioned 'Carroll versus Trump', and wished Kaplan "GOOD LUCK FOR TOMORROW". She later deleted the tweet.

Kaplan — who is unrelated to the case's judge with the same name — is a co-founder of the Time's Up movement, that provides legal aid to victims of sexual assault.

Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, sued the then-president Trump for defamation in a New York civil court in November 2019.

In an excerpt of her book published by New York Magazine that year, Carroll said she was raped by Trump in the changing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue in New York, in the mid-1990s.

Trump denied the accusation, saying Carroll was "not my type" and that she was "totally lying", which prompted the defamation suit.